What a difference 14 years make
Fort Myers-based Liberty Mortgage Lending Group Inc. was born. “She trained me on everything I needed to know,” she said of her sister, Debra Hernandez. It’s the leanest of operations, with her as chief financial officer and her sister as CEO. And that’s it, just the two of them. “It was a different time, and the timing was great. I wanted to make money – I like making money – and at the time, that’s where the money was.”
Make no mistake: Ray is not driven purely by a profit motive but the rewards of helping people achieve the American Dream of homeownership. She described enjoying the challenge of working on the more complicated cases others may pass along to someone else to handle.
“We love that challenge,” she said. “We have great mortgage clients and great relationships. We have the opportunity to meet people not just on the mortgage level but on a personal level. Sometimes, we’re fortunate enough to work with people who are really in a difficult situation, or they think they can’t get a mortgage and to be able to get them to that closing table – it’s an incredible high. It’s such a cool feeling.”
She recalled one customer in particular, a young man from Mexico who was denied three times before coming to Liberty Mortgage Lending Group on what amounted to something of a Hail Mary pass.
“His family came to us after finding us on Google,” she recalled. “His real estate agent, who was also family, said, ‘hey, can you help us out here? This can’t be right.’ When we looked at it, his income had been grossly miscalculated – by three different brokers! It was weird because it was W2 income. When we recalculated it, everything was solid. His credit ratio was great, the debt ratio was good. It ended up being an easy loan – if we got it done in seven to 10 days, which we did, that’s not a hard loan.”
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