In addition to her work as a loan officer, Nguyen is also a real estate investor – with a focus on multifamily housing – through her eponymous Frances Nguyen Group. She described her efforts in advising on this front toward a wealth-building goal via monthly meetings with community members.
“We get people in the community together to learn about investing and just networking with other people in making contacts,” she said. “I do a lot of outreach work.”
That work extends beyond the boundaries of her Seattle base. As an extension of her work with AREA – the Asian Real Estate Association, she recently traveled to Washington, DC, to advocate for underserved communities, meeting with US Rep. Kim Schrier and US Rep. Adam Smith. A current focus in such advocacy is to dissuade representation of Asians as monolithic but rather as a diverse patchwork of distinct cultures, each suffused with unique dynamics, characteristics and needs.
One area she advocates with some clients is the importance of credit: “With the Asian culture, a lot of them believe that cash is king, and to not have any debt,” she said. “By doing that, though, they hurt themselves because they’re not building credit and can’t buy a house. So that’s one of the things I’ve been working on is helping underserved communities gain homeownership. It’s a lot harder, but also very rewarding working with immigrant families.”
It all began at home
To understand what makes Nguyen tick is to delve not just into her professional approach but into watershed moments from her personal narrative as well. Her intimate knowledge of the Asian community comes by virtue of being the child of Vietnamese immigrant parents who brought her to the US when she was two years old, she noted.
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