About Trevor Roberge – WA Down Payment Program Specialist

“I THOUGHT BUYING A HOME WAS OUT OF REACH.”

Then someone in Washington finally sat down and explained the one number she’d had wrong all along — and the door she thought was locked wasn’t.

She’d run the math a hundred times at her own kitchen table, and the math always won. Rent, gas, groceries, the car payment. And somewhere out past all of it, the number everyone had told her she needed before she could even think about a house:

Twenty percent down. On the homes she actually wanted, that was a wall with no door in it. So she stopped looking. Not loudly. The way most people stop — quietly, telling themselves someday, while the spreadsheet glowed on the screen and said not you, not yet, maybe never.

If you’ve ever sat in that exact chair, you already know it’s not really about money. It’s the feeling that the whole thing was built for other people, and somewhere along the way you missed the meeting where they handed out the instructions.

Here’s what almost nobody sits down to tell you: for a first-time buyer in Washing￾ton, that twenty-percent rule is largely a myth. The state runs down payment assistance — including the Covenant Homeownership Program — that can cover much of the upfront cash, often structured as a 0% second loan. The door wasn’t locked. She’d just never been handed the right key, by anyone willing to slow down long enough to explain which one fit her situation.

The person who finally did was Trevor Roberge.