Travis Winfield knows how to use a financial weapon most veterans never fire.
Only about 13 percent of eligible veterans have used their VA home loan benefit, Winfield said, despite homeownership being one of the most accessible tools available to build wealth.
A 24-year Navy veteran, Winfield is the founder of Military Operated Real Estate (MORE), a certification and referral network for agents who serve military families. The company launched publicly in December and has since grown to 105 certified agents across 35 states, covering 73 percent of the country’s 215 military installations, Winfield said.
Owning a piece of it
For Winfield, the case for homeownership starts with what people actually need to survive.
“There’s only a few things you have to have in life,” Winfield said. “You need food, you need housing, and you need some medical.”
For those who’ve served, he said, that need comes with a set of tools most never use. Less than 1 percent of Americans have ever volunteered to serve, Winfield said, yet only about 13 percent of eligible veterans have used their VA home loan benefit — a gap he attributes in part to a benefits literacy crisis inside the military community itself.
That gap has real consequences. Winfield described a listing appointment where a disabled veteran was prepared to sell his home to fund his son’s college tuition — unaware that California offers free tuition at state universities to dependents of disabled veterans. Once Winfield shared that information, the family no longer needed to sell.
That moment, he said, is why MORE trains its agents to function as benefits experts alongside real estate professionals — not just to close transactions, but to surface the tools their clients already have.
“If you serve your country, you deserve to own a piece of it,” Winfield said, attributing the sentiment to a phrase he’s heard others use.
Active-duty service members also have access to an extended capital gains exemption window that most buyers don’t, Winfield said, one of the many benefits service members have access to that most are unaware of, as are many agents.
“What if I told you there’s a strategy where you can buy a home at every duty station, and by the time you get out of the military, I can make you a million overnight,” Winfield said.
A gap in the market
The idea for MORE took shape over roughly a decade, Winfield said, after he noticed a gap in trusted national brands serving military families.
“Name a national brand that you can trust as a service member or military family when it comes to real estate,” Winfield said. “It doesn’t really exist.”
Winfield pointed to Navy Federal Credit Union and USAA as examples of what that trust looks like in banking and insurance — institutions that, he said, own roughly 92 percent of market share among military families in those categories because they specialize and speak the community’s language. No equivalent, he said, exists in real estate.
Part of the problem, Winfield said, is that military life carries a set of circumstances most civilian agents have never encountered: moves every two to three years on orders, purchases made sight unseen from overseas, time zone differences that complicate communication and financial decisions that often have to happen faster than the market allows.
“You don’t know what it’s like to serve unless you’ve actually served,” Winfield said.
Raising the standard
MORE requires proof of military affiliation before an agent can apply for certification, including a DD-214, military ID or documentation establishing dependent status. Agents then complete 35 hours of self-paced curriculum and must show at least three VA loan transactions before they can carry the MORE certification, Winfield said.
Winfield contrasted that standard with the National Association of Realtors’ Military Relocation Professional certification, which he said requires no military affiliation or transaction history to obtain.
“I’m not really okay with that,” Winfield said. “So we’re raising that standard.”
The curriculum goes beyond transaction mechanics, Winfield said. Agents learn how military pay structures work, how to navigate time zone differences with overseas clients and how to facilitate sight-unseen purchases — a common reality for families receiving orders abroad.
Built-in accountability
Certification is not a rubber stamp, Winfield said. Agents who violate MORE’s ethics policies do not face unilateral removal — they face a board of their peers, structured after military disciplinary processes.
“We’re going to create a board of your peers, just like we do in the military, and they’re going to determine your fate, not me,” Winfield said.
MORE also builds in a consumer-facing quality control component, Winfield said. After a transaction closes, the company follows up directly with the veteran or military family to verify their experience met the standard expected of a MORE-certified agent — functioning, he said, as a check on the network independent of the transaction itself.
The first cohort of agents to go through the certification process had a 50 percent dropout rate, Winfield said — something he described as a feature rather than a flaw.
“This is not for everybody,” Winfield said. “I want to set the standard where the service members are going to want to recognize us as the gold standard.”
His measure of success, he said, will come when agents who previously declined certification start coming back.
“It’s going to be when that one agent comes knocking on my door who said no before,” Winfield said. “It’s like, well, I just had a client who wouldn’t hire me because I’m not certified with MORE.”
Spouses and service members
MORE has also built programs aimed at two groups Winfield said the industry has largely overlooked: military spouses and transitioning service members.
The More Ambassador Program licenses military spouses as referral agents in a single state, allowing them to earn 25 percent of the commission on transactions they facilitate by connecting relocating families with MORE-certified agents at the next duty station, Winfield said.
The program was built around a structural problem, he said — military spouse unemployment runs five to seven times the national average, driven by the relentless cycle of moves that makes building a sustained career nearly impossible.
“Who do you rely on for recommendations when you’re moving from one duty station to another?” Winfield said. “Your fellow spouses.”
The company also operates as a SkillBridge sponsor. The Department of Defense program allows service members in their final three to six months of active duty to train with civilian employers rather than report for duty. Through MORE’s sponsorship, transitioning service members can embed with real estate teams in the network, Winfield said, building their business before they ever separate from service.
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