Well, two bad ones. And one really good one.
When my husband and I bought our first home in early 2013, we met with three lenders. The first pigeonholed us into an FHA loan based on a credit situation I caused myself. I paid off old collections that should have been left alone and tanked my husband's score so badly he couldn't be on the loan at all. So we bought our first house on one income. Conservative, right?
The second barely looked at me. He directed every word to my husband even though I was the one on the application.
The third was a woman mortgage broker who listened. She structured an "80-10-10" that worked for us and explained it in a way that actually made sense. When I called her out on a rate that had moved up an eighth from the last time we'd spoken Friday afternoon, she leaned back in her chair, folded her hands, and said:
She let it hang.
And I thought: You're not. You're the only person who listened to what our goals were, and you were giving me exactly what I wanted. Just like that, the little bump in rate wasn't important anymore. Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.
A few months later I was at a nonprofit board meeting and a mortgage lender handed me his card, saying, "You have some really good ideas... We should have lunch sometime." I forgot about it. My "friend" found it on my desk and asked why I had it. I started explaining, and somewhere in the middle of the sentence it hit me like a rubber band snapping back: this has never been your plan. The salaried job. The benefits. None of it was the plan.
I took my first wedding anniversary off work and sat through six days of licensing classes straight. Fell more in love every night. Licensed November 2013 and officially straight commission by April 2014. I made less than $20,000 my first year. It's a good thing I'm full of perseverance!
I was under 30 with a brand new license, working in Houston, trying to be taken seriously as a young woman in a very male room. My daughter was born in October 2015. People told me my career was over before it started.
Spoiler alert: it wasn't.
But my husband left his job for what was supposed to be three weeks and it turned into eighteen months. Cloth diapers. I nursed for two and a half years because formula wasn't in the budget. Aldi pinterest boards for our "makin' grocery" date nights. Carl's Jr. once a month as a treat because we could play "Search & Find" for an hour before they kicked us out.
I painted a sign during that season that still hangs in my office. It says: "It's simple, not easy."
That's also where my three mantras come from. I still say them out loud when I start to spiral:
I call it my humbling season. I'm grateful for it as it's a beautiful chapter in our story.
Then in August 2017, my dad died unexpectedly in Louisiana. The same day Hurricane Harvey hit Houston. We decided the best thing to help was for me to stay in Louisiana with our daughter, who wasn't quite two yet, since we were one of the lucky few who didn't flood. I'm grateful our home was able to provide refuge to two families while I was deep in grief. I didn't do much during those weeks besides feed myself, my child, my mom, and scroll Facebook.
In a big online community full of real estate agents, people were posting every time a lender let them down. So I started showing up! I answered questions, quickly, and I explained what I would have done differently. (That's where I met Julio, who is still my partner on deals today.)
Before long I was invited into a private group of top-producing women agents from all over the country. 99 women; 97 realtors & 2 lenders. I was one of them.
We got real with each other. Those friendships turned into referral relationships. I built my own funnel from scratch and closed loans for an agent's database several states away without ever setting foot there. One mega agent tagged me online after getting fed up with her lender, moved her whole book, and sent me a wave of referrals before we'd ever met in person.
February 23, 2020. We were in Louisiana for Mardi Gras. I woke up to the market crashing and my phone lighting up. I never left the bed. I locked ten loans before lunch.
By the end of that spring I was the one carrying our household, and I have been ever since. I know exactly what that pressure feels like at 2am.
It's why I don't rush the people I work with, and it's why I won't let them make a decision from fear.
I don't pretend to guide clients through anything I haven't done myself.
In 2021 we were house hunting all over the country. Tucson. Raleigh. Nashville. Cincinnati. Standing inside an 1883 house on our third Cincinnati tour, Jonathan looked at me and said: every house we look at reminds me of New Orleans. Why are we not looking there?
Because I'm a sixth-generation New Orleanian that didn't realize we could move "back home" before retirement, that's why! Now, our daughter gets to understand what it means to be The Seventh.
We went under contract on our house the exact weekend rates spiked in June 2022. Everyone said we should wait! Like I always say, "The market's going to market, and life is going to life. The right time to buy is when it's right for your family." Before our daughter's first grade was the right time for us. She's had four Mardi Gras seasons because we weren't scared of a rate closer to 7% than 4%.
Last November I stood up in a room of women who run real businesses, my Empire Circle mastermind, and admitted that I always feel like I'm in the messy middle - something's always on fire.
Sarah, who runs a team that closes over a thousand transactions a year, corrected me: "We've got to stop calling it the messy middle. It's the magic middle. It doesn't get better. It doesn't feel better."
I was mad about it for a day, until my friend Erin said the thing I needed to hear: "Biz, we're not doing anything wrong. We're doing everything right. If we weren't, we wouldn't be in the room."
So here's where I am: New Orleans, five years home, 650+ loans closed, $190M+ funded, seven states — still in the room, still in the magic middle, and I'd love to show you what I so clearly see about where you're going next.
No forms. No wait. Just a real conversation.
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