Natasha Vickers

I attribute my success to never giving up on a loan and remembering that there are people attached to our job. A lot of people forget that, but there have been plenty of times where you're just almost crying with the homeowners because you didn't give up. I'm super passionate about it because it's one of the biggest decisions that people can make, and I make sure that I go to the very end, no matter what. Of course, you have to follow all the rules - it's so stringent - but being creative enough to make sure it happens is what sets me apart. For example, I had a refinance situation where the appraisal wasn't happy with their pool, and they needed to fill it or get a tarp, but they didn't have money to buy a $7,000 tarp or cover. So we ended up going on Amazon and trying to find the biggest tarp that we could find that the appraiser would find justified and that would fit in the budget. Luckily, it was enough for the appraiser to approve that improvement on the pool to keep that loan going. It's just thinking outside of the box, not only to make sure you can hit that goal, but because I'm so passionate about it.

Not only am I a woman, but I'm also a Black and Puerto Rican woman in the mortgage industry, which is very heavily male-dominant, and I'm in Indiana, so my coworkers are usually older men. I would say that those feminine qualities are so necessary, and it circles back to how important a mortgage really is. It's so important, and I think a woman can really connect with the fears and worry when people take out these loans. Just being yourself and putting all of those characteristics that come with a woman really stands you apart from a male-dominant industry, and that's why women are succeeding more and more. It used to be only 10%, now it's almost up to 40%. It's that nurturing step, being kind but firm throughout that process. As long as we keep that, and if you don't think about the reward and you just think about yourself and the person that's connected to it, you can definitely succeed.

For the last couple of years, the interest rate was just so high that it was hard to find buyers, and it was hard to find people that qualified because so many people started racking up debt too. Making those numbers fit became very, very tricky, so being creative almost was necessary to make some of these things happen. Depending on if you worked for a bank or if you worked for a brokerage really made a staple to who can qualify and who couldn't. The other biggest challenge is the lack of knowledge in general. When somebody's been at their job for a couple of years and they think they can do this, they come into it without necessarily knowing what's expected. It's really hard to have that first month or first couple of weeks of being like, hey, I know you thought this walking in, but this is actually the reality. The lack of knowledge is tough because it is such an emotional, big leap of faith. I've done events where you try to do homeowner education, but it reaches a small population and it's not as exposed as what you see in the algorithm on TikTok and Instagram, where mostly what you see is 'we'll fill out this information and we'll reach out to you' - but it's not giving them the knowledge first. Those two things have been tough, but now the market is coming down, so it's very hopeful.