You fill in the lending terms field the way your seller feels about it and move on, and you have probably never been asked about it. The agent in this interview calls the listing agent every time she sees VA missing, and the answer she gets back is almost always a belief rather than a reason.
Sarah Hall spent two decades in fitness and professional fighting before real estate. The host credits her with landing in the top 1% nationwide with Veterans United in her first year, working in Texas.
She reads the lending terms field on other people's listings, and when VA is missing she picks up the phone. "I'll look through a house and it VA isn't listed as listing term and I'll call the agent and have a discussion and they're like, oh, well, my my seller just doesn't want to deal with a VA loan. Well, why not?"
Her position on the loan itself is short: "really understand that your VA loan is one of the best loans out there. Um, it is no harder than an FHA loan." And the repairs that scare sellers are, in her experience, negotiable and doable. "there are always ways to have repairs done if needed." She lists what she has actually gotten through: "I've had new roofs put on houses, I've had foundation work, I've had um new plumbing put in, uh little things like siding, that's easy", plus a current deal where "the buyers were willing to put in a new septic system".
The consequence she puts to the listing agent is about their own seller's outcome, not about veterans: "when you if you will or unwilling to take a VA loan, you are cutting a large part of the population out of your buyers pool. And it it it's not to your advantage."
Where the buyers are is not evenly spread, and she is direct about that too. She says she would not have had the same success doing this in Washington: "there's not a lot of veterans running to Washington, okay? They're all running to Texas."
She ends on the version she would say out loud: "at the end of the day your seller is providing a home to somebody who signed up to die for you."
“I'll look through a house and it VA isn't listed as listing term and I'll call the agent and have a discussion”
The lending terms field is the rare piece of a listing that quietly removes buyers before anyone sees the house, and it usually gets filled in during a five-minute conversation where the seller repeats something they heard about VA appraisals a decade ago. Nobody goes back and revisits it. So the check is worth running on your own inventory first, before you call anyone else's: pull your active listings and see which ones carry VA in the terms, then find out whether that was a decision or a default.
On the other side, this is a specific reason to call a listing agent that is not a nuisance call, because you are pointing at something that costs their client money. That is a different conversation from asking whether they will take your offer. Two things worth confirming locally before you make it a habit: how your MLS treats an empty versus a restricted lending terms field, and what your state actually allows a seller to refuse. Know that before you tell someone else's client they are leaving buyers on the table.