Chace Barber is 35 years old and you could call him a job creator. The serial entrepreneur owns two small businesses, one of which has 11 full-time employees and has raised upward of $1.5 million from private equity to date, per CB Insights. And yet, the bank won’t give him a mortgage. It’s why he lives in his parents’ basement in Merritt, a city in British Columbia, Canada. “They look at me and my business partner, who also still can’t buy a house, and say, ‘oh, sorry, ‘you’re a little bit too risky,’” Barber told Fortune.
Whenever Barber has spoken with a lender, he says they’ve told him that they need to see a three-year business history and a stable income for the same amount of time, but he can’t do that because he was putting his earnings back into his companies and only paying himself what he needed to get by. Either way, he was told he needed to save enough money to put 20% down as a business owner.
