Mortgage Genius Secrets & Success Stories with Jodie Tanga

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Interview Transcription

ADRIENNE:
thanks for listening to the team Lally real estate show, home of the guaranteed sold program, we’ll buy it. I’m Adrienne and I’m still Attilio. And if you have any questions, give us a call at 799, 9596 or check us out online at Team lally.com

ATTILIO:
Hey everybody. Our guest today is a trusted mortgage banker, broker and loan officer with deep expertise in Hawaii’s real estate market, raised in Kailua and a proud graduate of Iolani School. Ooh, that’s one big bus ride. She went on to earn both her undergraduate and graduate degrees in financial economics at the University of San Francisco. Ooh, even longer bus ride.

ADRIENNE:
After gaining valuable banking experience on the mainland, she returned home to Hawaii and founded Pacific Rim mortgage, where her innovative client, first approach, has set a new standard in the industry. Please welcome back our mortgage genius and one of the experts we trust, Jodi Tonga.

ATTILIO:
Jodi Tanga, I think you should, I think you should like, we should introduce you like, on a video, you coming in slow motion. You’re wearing, like, sunglasses. There’s a fog machine, like, some theme music.

JODIE:
That’s what I want. We need to do that.

ATTILIO:
Let’s get ready

ATTILIO:
to rumble. It’s the mortgage genius, that’s a good wrestling name. Mortgage genius, yes, I think you can pull it off. Hey, you know the other thing,

ADRIENNE:
people, she’s wrestling with these higher interest rates. Yeah, I’m like getting them down. Yeah, she’s got all these strategies to get them read, pushing them way down.

ATTILIO:
Looking at those terms, Body Slam, atomic, Body Slam, we need a better deal for our clients. So Jodie, Oh, one other thing, you played soccer in college. Yeah, I did what position

JODIE:
I played, center half.

ATTILIO:
Okay, so you’re the distributor, like you get the ball.

JODIE:
Yep, I was, you know, the quarterback of the team,

ATTILIO:
yeah, now you’re the quarterback of your mortgage team. So anyway, I just like analogies, and I like soccer, so that’s why I brought that up. Anyway. What you got for us this week? And we have, I mean,

JODIE:
we are currently seeing improved interest rates. We’re probably today’s rates are probably around a 20 month low, yeah. So it’s as low as it’s been for the past 20 months. And you know it’s, they’re, they’re, they’re really good right now, relatively speaking, yeah.

ATTILIO:
And you know what I just you’re calling. So, so many times that I was doing in the like the quick call in kind questions, I need to switch gears. You’re the guest. Tell us we know your history from the intro. Why did you get into mortgage? Why did you become a mortgage broker?

JODIE:
So, really cool story. Yeah, I was coming home for a visit and on a plane ride, pretty much met a guy that was flying a whole bunch of his staff and top producers to Hawaii. And I was like, what do you do that you can, you can afford to fly all these people to Hawaii for like, a 10 day vacation, all expenses paid, you know? And he was like, Well, I own a mortgage company. And so that was the first seed that got planted where I was like, wow, that is impressive.

ATTILIO:
You know, it’s always like those little things that can alter the course of your life. Because I was in my head, I was thinking, like, what if you said I’m a crack dealer? Yeah, then you be the crack genius.

ADRIENNE:
Think, no, no, goodness, he didn’t say that. Yeah, he was the mortgage company owner,

ATTILIO:
yeah? No, he was the mortgage. He was in mortgage. And then here you go, and then you’re like, hey, you know what? I should go do that. And you’ve been what has been the key, because you’re doing it at a high level. You’re plenty mortgage brokers, but nobody does it at a high level like Jodi and her team. How do you guys do it at such a high level, like volume and all of that, and happy customers?

JODIE:
I think the biggest difference between us and other all other mortgage brokers and loan officers and mortgage bankers like it just doesn’t really matter how you’re doing mortgages. Yeah, but the biggest difference is that I have a team, and it’s very similar to, you know, the Keller Williams model. It’s very similar to the team Lally model, in that I actually have a team of nine people that all have one common goal, which is servicing our buyers and our past customers at a high level. And it’s hard to understand the difference, because sometimes I talk to first time homebuyers and investors alike, and they’re like, Okay, wow, so you have a team like that, like, how does that help me? And the reason it helps everyone is because when I’m doing things like this, or when I’m in a signing or when I’m on a 45 minute zoom consult, or when I’m doing whatever it is that I do on a regular basis, there’s still a whole bunch of things that need to occur. There might be another realtor that finally took their buyer on a listing, you know, to go see a property, and there, after the 11th showing, they’re finally like, wow, I do love this one. I do want to submit an offer, you know, and so now they need the pre approval letter. And if I’m doing this, and they call me, I’m not going to answer, and then they’re like, emailing me and saying they need the pre approval letter. And, you know, I don’t know. I could take one hour. It could take two hours before I get back to them, right? Yeah. But the way that my team is set up is that, as all of these needs are happening, where, you know, the hundreds of buyers that we work with are in different phases of the process. At any given time, it’s like, oh, I talked to my auntie, and now I have a question about this, like, what’s the, you know, I wanted to pick your brain about points or whatever it may be, yeah, and we have, I have Casey, I have Derek, I have cat and Jeannie, that are all able to answer the questions and meet the customers needs in real time. And that is a huge differentiating factor.

ADRIENNE:
So you guys are, like, interchangeable as far as like, Jodie’s doing the radio show, and there’s a burning question, any one of them have been trained on how to strategize on these questions.

ATTILIO:
Just clarifying, those are people on your team? Those aren’t cats.

JODIE:
No, those aren’t cats. No, those are not cats. Those are key members, people.

ATTILIO:
There’s gonna be a mortgage broker. They got like, five cats at the office, and like me and my team, there’s fluffy, there’s Snooki. I’m like, What? What kind of team members is that? So make sure it’s like, cats.

ADRIENNE:
But Jodie does have a dog that goes to the office with her, Lola goes to the

ATTILIO:
office. What’s their dog’s name?

JODIE:
Hoda and Haru and then Genie sod, Daisy. Daisy, God’s name?

ATTILIO:
Yes. When. Do you guys so we have, we have Lola sister, Roxy. Roxy, you know what we put our we have Isabel,

ADRIENNE:
yeah, we have some of our animals on our website. Do you guys have yours on your website? As you

ATTILIO:
guys are regulated more, so you’d be like, you can’t be putting Lola on the Meet the team page. It’s not, you know, whatever which you’re more regulated than us.

JODIE:
We are, and it did take a couple years before I got the green light to call myself a mortgage genius. Oh, wow. You know it’s a funny memory hook. It’s like a marketing like, tagline, you know? And it was funny because our compliance, one of our compliance guys was like, You can’t call yourself the mortgage genius. And I was like, Yes, I can. I want to call myself the mortgage genius. And he was like, Okay.

ATTILIO:
And I would have been like, I then I said, Well, how about not the mortgage?

JODIE:
Moron. Yeah, how about that.

ADRIENNE:
So how did you how did you get around it, Jodie? Did you just keep like at it, and you’re persistent? Kept asking. Or did you change your Did you legally change your middle name? Did you

ATTILIO:
use Jedi mind tricks?

JODIE:
So I think it like we were talking about, like, Apple geniuses. You know how they’re called Apple geniuses when you go meet, yeah, yeah. Basically, I just got him to understand that it was more of a memory hook, and that there’s no test or anything that that you take to certify you as a mortgage genius. Yeah. And he was like, Okay. And then he kind of did some research on it, and he was like, Okay, I guess I can buy into it. So then that’s when I added it to my like, actual, like idol on my signature line.

ATTILIO:
I think he should have gone into professional wrestling on the side and had that as your moniker, and said, Well, no, that’s just my wrestling name.

ADRIENNE:
Is it on your business cards? Also, Jodie. It is correct. Yes, it’s everywhere.

ATTILIO:
The mortgage genius, like, I mean, just that alone is, like, You got to be pretty confident to call yourself blank genius. But, I mean, it just depends on the context of people, like, the whole way to go. Genius, like, do you don’t want to be that genius, right? Like, way to go.

ADRIENNE:
Genius, other genius, like, yes. Thank you. Thank you to the mortgage. Genius, you saved me 1000s of dollars. Do you

ATTILIO:
have a lot of people that sound like EKM and man, in your consultation that are saying stuff like, I did not know that.

JODIE:
The way that I know when I’m gonna really get along with one of our buyers, yeah, is when they’re like, by the way, love the title, you know, then I’m like, oh, okay, I already can tell I like, you get it, you know, I’m

ATTILIO:
gonna give you my Denzel Washington impersonation. Okay, okay, okay, let me ask you something when you’re ordering coffee at Starbucks, do you give mortgage geniuses a name? I think you should not. I think you should do it yes. And I want to know there, and I want to videotape it Like, I literally, like, I love those places where they got to call out your name, because I always do incredible hope. And I know in my order comes up because they’re looking at the name, they’re looking up, they’re looking at the name. I said, Yeah, I know it’s incredible

ADRIENNE:
home. I know you’re not green though. I

ATTILIO:
said, and I said, and I this is what I tell him. I said, I’m not picking up the food to yell it out loud. And they just thought laughing. How about the guy in the back? I want to hear him yell it to incredible hole. Your ramen is ready. I do it. I do Spider Man. We were at the, what was that the Shake Shack in Vegas? Uh huh. I did, incredible. He did. And then I came on say, incredible. They’re just laughing because it’s fast food that sucks. They want to have fun.

ADRIENNE:
Okay, so we got the mortgage. Genius. We got, why did she get into the industry? I’d like to, I want to see a Tiktok video at the Starbucks with them calling out mortgage genius, your triple latte. You have your homework? Jodie, yeah, you got your homework. I want to see that. I want to hear some recent success stories, like an example of, you know, something that you were able to use your Genius skills to figure out and, you know, help someone either get a better rate or, you know, maybe they were turned down by the bank, yeah, and you’re like, Oh no, like, we can go this route. So do you have some examples of some, some recent stories that you can share with our listeners? Stories of hope?

JODIE:
Well, we have one recent one that’s really simple yet so powerful, because he really fell in love with this one house, and he it just like it, he just, he had to have it, you know, yeah, so the first lender he was talking to was like, There’s you don’t, we just can’t qualify for it. Like, there’s nothing we can do to qualify for it, you know. And then the seller’s agent actually recommended. Like, why don’t you try Jody, like she’s who I refer a lot of my buyers to, and maybe she can at least give a second opinion. You know, So, long story short, just because of my platform in the way that we do loans, my rate was lower. And so a that already helped, because now we’re working with a lower monthly payment, which decreases his overall debt to income ratio. And then after seeing how close we were to be able to qualify for it, I was like, Well, what if, then it was so counter intuitive, because I said, What if we offer 25k more, you know, and he’s like, Wait a minute. You’re You’re telling me, I don’t qualify it now you’re telling me to qualify for Tony to offer 25k where I’m like, okay, hear me out. So then we offer 25k over. We got a 25k sell of credit. We used that money to pay off one of his auto loans, because he has, he has he had more than one auto loan, and he that monthly auto loan payment was like $659 a month. So in doing that, we were able to come pay that and omit that liability, which means we did not have to factor it into the debt to income ratio. And even with the 25k higher, we use the extra money to get an even lower rate than we were then. I was already lower, but now we went even like two tiers lower, and the long story short is he ended up paying less, paying off debt and qualifying for the house

ADRIENNE:
and having a lower payment overall, yeah?

ATTILIO:
And Jodie, lower payment overall. When this information was shared with him, we have a recording. Would you like to hear

JODIE:
it? Yeah, yes.

ATTILIO:
Oh, thank you, Jodie. You know, my name is Ikaika, and when you got me on his help, I was like, you know, even though I went heavy keeper operator with the union local, 5592, you know we’re supposed to be rough and tough and stuff like that, but you know you’re helping me with home ownership, and I thank you so much. You’re so tiny, I feel like I can carry you in one hand and take you home with your little dog.

ATTILIO:
Jodie is is a tiny lady, but on the radio, you sound like you’re seven and a half feet tall. But good things come in small packages.

ADRIENNE:
And then with this example, I just want to point out to our listeners, it was clearly a VA loan, right? Because it’s the only the VA loan allows you to pay off consumer debt. Is that the only loan product that allows them Jodie or is or others actually

JODIE:
permit loans. So government

ADRIENNE:
loans, okay? So that could be another strategy where maybe they’re conventional. So someone that has a similar situation, they could move to a government loan and then pay off some extra debt, if they have a lot of if they got some big seller credits.

ATTILIO:
You think about it too, because when people are not in homes, paying the mortgage payment, they’re spending money on a bunch of dumb stuff. And get the Amazon Prime in the lake, all these boxes, and next, you know, I’m $20,000 on my credit card, and I have all these boxes from Amazon that I think that’s super helpful, because it kind of, it’s kind of like a reset, right? They don’t have all these bills, and they can just focus on the mortgage, because I don’t know about you, but Jeff baziles isn’t gonna give you one he left down the road when you got to send your

ADRIENNE:
kids to college, usually, like credit card loans and car loans and car loans like they’re typically much higher than the, what, like Five 6% interest rate that we have on the whole

ATTILIO:
scene. Industry stats, the average is that’s in the almost, like mid 20% like it’s high. It was like crazy how much the credit card industry is making on

ADRIENNE:
that’s an excellent strategy and a great example of thinking outside the box. Jodie like, just to make it happen.

ATTILIO:
And you people, when Jodie does this for you, do not go rack up the personal data again. Yeah. Stop it. Stop it. All right.

ADRIENNE:
All right. So, Jodie, we’ve got about four minutes. Four minutes left. Is there is Is there anything more on that story, or any other stories you can share with our listeners? You’re the

ATTILIO:
monkeys genius. Can you give us another nugget

JODIE:
we have? I mean, there’s so many stories I have, one that we just closed, which I I really I just, I love, love, love this buyer and this family, yeah, and she basically came to me, like, a year and she was like, I have to have this house. Like, it’s not even for sale, but I was vacant, right? Okay, gonna come up for sale, but I don’t basically like in Waianae, like a block away from beach access and the she and her family go there regularly, so they would drive and see the house.

ATTILIO:
And emotional attachment, yeah, a lot

JODIE:
of emotional attack, how he doesn’t even like to. Have any ties to right? So she just like, there was something calling to her that was like, This is my house. This half family’s house. Yeah? So we strategize on how we’re going to be able to refinance out of a VA loan into a conventional loan. When that time comes, she’s able to use the VA and do zero down. And so, I mean, it was literally step by step, because first her credit score wasn’t high enough to refinance out of the VA loan. So we had to work through that, right? So I had to help her with that, and then she got to where she needed to be. And then we’re like, yes, you can do it. So we did step one, and we got her out of the VA loan. And then just recently, maybe, like, like, 70 days ago or so, the house went up on the market. And so, you know, they submitted an offer, and then it was a low ball. I mean, no, it wasn’t a low ball, but it was the seller was like, ah, that’s just a little bit too low. And we bit higher, right? But it was the most he could qualify for, yeah. So then we tweaked around again with seller credit, and there was, he also had some money. So I was like, Okay, this is what I I know you don’t necessarily want to do a down payment, because you don’t have to, right with the VA, but because we got the money when we did the refi and we took some equity out of your other property, we now have that money so and the plan was to keep that money To be able to fix up the house, I know, but if we use it, or we didn’t use all of it, but we use like half of it, yeah, then you qualify. You know, so long story short, she just got her keys on house that she, I mean, she was utterly in tears. And she was like, my three kids are going to grow up in this house. This is our forever home. And I just knew a year ago that this was going to be my house. I just, she was like, God told me. And I was just like, Oh my God, because I’ve never had someone that’s been tracking a house that it’s not like it was her grandpa’s house, you know, it’s like it’s it was just a house near the beach spot that they always go to as a as an ohana,

ATTILIO:
yeah, that is a nice story. We’re coming to the end of the show. I’m telling you, the harlequin channel, TV channel, they got knocked in that was way more a better of a tear jerker than the heart, then the net, than that TV show. Yes.

ADRIENNE:
So Jodie Tanga the mortgage genius with just many, many success stories, but any of our listeners have questions and they want to be her next success story? Yeah, reach out. Okay, thanks. Jodie. Jodie, all right, thank you guys.

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