Jerry Avila

I’m a mortgage professional, VA loan educator, and Veteran advocate whose career has become centered around one mission: making sure Veterans and active-duty service members understand the home loan benefit they earned and have someone in their corner who knows how to fight for it. I’m not a Veteran, and I’ve never tried to borrow that title. I’ve built my career around serving those who did. For nearly a decade, VA loans have made up more than 90% of my mortgage business. That experience has put me in the middle of everything from straightforward VA purchases to difficult scenarios involving entitlement, manual underwriting, construction, renovation, residual income, property eligibility, lender overlays, and Veterans who were previously told no. My passion for advocacy started years ago when I saw firsthand how military families could be negatively impacted when the people responsible for helping them did not fully understand the protections, programs, and benefits available to them. That changed the direction of my career. Today, I’m with NEXA Lending and Home Advocacy Partners, where my approach is simple: education comes before the transaction. I’m also heavily involved with Vetted VA, helping mortgage professionals expand their VA knowledge while keeping one standard above everything else: Veteran first. I teach VA lending because I believe Veterans should never have to depend entirely on a salesperson to understand their own benefit. I want them to know what they have, how it works, and what their options really are. No gimmicks. No watered-down information. No steering someone into an inferior loan because the person helping them doesn’t understand VA lending. Whether I’m educating a Veteran one-on-one, teaching mortgage professionals, speaking at events, or fighting through a difficult loan scenario, my goal stays the same: Educate first. Advocate always. Find a way forward. I also don’t look at the people I work with as files or commission checks. They become friends. And I approach it the same way I would with any friend: if there’s a way to help, I’m going to fight and claw to find it.