Be Careful When Speaking Lender / Real Estate

Be Careful When Speaking Lender / Real Estate I called my friend George Souto this week during that call I recalled an incident I first reported here almost exactly four years ago. At that time it had been an article by Brian Brady that brought the story to mind. Today it was George’s Connecticut Housing Finance Authority (CHFA) Trying To Contribute To Real Estate Recovery In Connecticut

Be Careful When Speaking Lender / Real Estate! We must understand real estate and lending are separate dialects! If you spoke only American Colloquial English a term like "first time home buyer" would mean a real estate virgin, someone who’d never owned a house! But, if you spoke "lender" it means anyone who hasn’t owned a house in the last three years!

That’s a huge difference if you’re a former home owner looking to get back into a home of your own!

If dialects cause such troubles you can guess what happens when American English Lending or Real Estate gets interpreted into a totally separate languish!

Be Careful When Speaking Lender / Real Estate!

It almost got me shot!

I had done almost two dozen loans for a family who's primary language was Tagalog, when they refereed me to a brother who was moving to Las Vegas from the LA area. I was told that neither he nor his wife spoke English, I offered to have one of my Tagalog speaking Originators call. No it seems that the brother was raised in a village somewhere in Belize and spoke a mixed dialect of Spanish and Tagalog, like the Tex-Mex spoken in some areas of South West Texas.

With the brother in my office we took the application over the speaker phone, I understood one word in fifty. Knowing the brother was hard to reach I asked how I was going to talk with the client? It seems that they had moved to LA 9 years ago so their daughter could go to school there, at 14 she could translate for me after school.

Well the first time I needed to talk to the young woman I found out that besides her native tongue that only her family spoke, her primary language was "Valley Girl" we got through it but it wasn't easy.

Late one Thursday afternoon she called, her mother wanted to know how long the loan was for? I responded "it's amortized over 30 years" she slammed the phone in my ear. It was a long day I was tired, I thought no more of it.

Early the next morning as I rived at the office I noticed the large Oldsmobile sitting full of people with the engine running. I had no sooner sat my brief case down when a large man angrily shouting rushed in!

I couldn't understand a single word, I truly didn't know what was going on.

Thankfully his brother came running across the parking lot, at least now I could assume this was my LA client.

 After his brother got him to stop shouting he turned to me. He asked if I had talk to his niece yesterday? I said yes she called, ask a question and hung up on me. He asked what she asked and I told him. He asked what I said? I told him I had told her "the loam was amortized over 30 years."

The brother starts laughing! After an awful long time he starts talking to my client, now they're both laughing. I begin to think I'm not going to have to fight, to survive.

It seemed like hours but was probably more like 15 minutes before he explains to me that the Valley Girl had mistaken "amortize" as some form of amour. The girl had told her mother I said, "I wanted to love her over thirty years!" The men left, I consider locking the door.

The uncle came back in and asked me to step out to the window in the lobby. The Olds pulled up in front. A woman in the front seat was shaking her finger at me.

An old woman in the back was shaking her fist. (She was the Matriarch, I had financed all of her children and all her adult Grandchildren.)

In the center peaking over front seat back with only her eyes and tri-colored hair showing was my translator.

Behind the wheel her father was still laughing.

We closed the loan a week later, but after 21 loans to the family I never got another. I saw one of the Granddaughters and ask her about it she said Grandma said no.

Be Careful When Speaking Lender / Real Estate!