HIS STORY
Joshua Potts || Principal Broker @ SPARTAN REAL ESTATE GROUP
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A Real Life Hero
Joshua Potts
Joshua Potts spent his 30th birthday training to become a Marine. He enlisted later in life after stints in finance and networking, ultimately deciding standing idle while others deployed after the attacks of 9/11 was not an option.
“When I enlisted, I only planned on doing four years — it was really like a spiritual thing for me. I was at a point in my life where, you know, I wasn’t married; I’m watching the war take place on TV and something inside of me said you need to give that a shot,” he explained.
The infantry took Potts overseas four times, including combat missions in Iraq and a humanitarian mission in Haiti. He signed on to four more years while deployed, but simultaneously started thinking about what’s next. Even though his MOS didn’t have an obvious translation in the civilian sector, his background in finance did.
“I reenlisted because I was in Iraq and at that point bonuses for my MOS were so high … now at this point I owned property … as I was beginning to wind down to getting out of the Marine Corps, I ended up here in Quantico as an instructor — a non-deployable billet — and I started buying rental properties here. … I knew the housing market after the crash, I saw a lot of good opportunities.”
After eight years in the Marine Corps, Potts applied his skills to help other veterans and military families in a different way: putting them in homes.
Potts opened Spartan Realty, LLC — a Virginia-based company, after attaining his real estate license and working as a broker for another agency. He says his experience has taught him that many misconceptions surround veteran benefits like the VA home loan.
“The VA loan benefit is the most obscure thing in the military — the military does not do a good job of teaching the active duty folks about the benefit,” he said. “Post-9/11 GI Bill — you know that’s kind of easy to figure out because the university is going to walk them [service members] through it when they register for classes, but the VA loan there’s no central movement within the DoD and it’s sad because this [a home] is probably the biggest thing someone is ever going to buy.”
He added that he has been able to turn “renters into home buyers” by sharing a little bit of education about the benefit.
Some examples of the benefits of a VA guaranteed loan, according to the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs website, include:
No down payment (*unless the lender requires it),
Reusable, and
VA staff assists home owners who become delinquent on loan.
[See the full list of benefits here.]