March 12, 2026 · personal
I joined Nika Ojo on episode 20 of the Women's Mortgage Network Podcast — a conversation about working with my dad, mortgage coaching, divorcing clients, and why a small-roster practice is by design.
A few weeks ago I sat down with Nika Ojo — a fellow loan officer out of Sugar Land, Texas, and one of the warmest voices in the Women’s Mortgage Network — for episode 20 of the WMN podcast. We talked for about half an hour. A lot of it surprised me.
Here’s what’s stayed with me since.
That’s what my dad said the night before, when I told him Nika would probably ask what it’s like to work together. It made me laugh, and it’s also the most honest answer I have. We were close before we were business partners. He’s the reason I have my license at all.
I had a six-month-old when COVID hit. We were in Austin, the world stopped, and our entire family was on the West Coast. We came home to Tahoe “just for the summer,” I shared office space with my dad, and I watched him have more fun with his clients than I was having with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance at my old firm. He suggested I get my license as a side thing. It took me three loans to call my old job and resign.
The label came naturally. I’m a lifelong athlete, and most people seek out a coach when they’re doing something they want to do well but aren’t sure how to do yet. Strength training. Nutrition. Money. There wasn’t a version of that for mortgages, so I built one.
What it actually means in practice: no question is too small, I break things down into bite-size pieces, and I’d rather have the conversation eighteen months early than two weeks late. Time’s going to pass anyway. That line is one I say a lot, and I meant it on the podcast too.
A small example. A past client emailed me yesterday because her property tax bill came in the mail and she’s impounded — meaning her servicer is paying it on her behalf. I could have just said “you’re fine, ignore it.” Instead I sent her the county link so she can verify the payment was actually released, and I showed her where on her servicing statement to look next time. The goal is for her to never need me to answer that question again.
Right now, on the north shore and across Northern Nevada, we’re still slightly in a buyer’s market. Sellers who watched their listings sit through the winter are motivated. Concessions toward closing costs are real. Cash-to-close numbers are coming in lower than buyers expect.
Waiting until summer doesn’t usually save money. Inventory comes back. Demand comes back. The market often shifts away from being a buyer’s market right when most people decide to start looking. The asset price is the part you can’t refinance later. The rate is the part you can.
It’s the line in the conversation I’m proudest of. I don’t have a goal to close a hundred loans a year. I want to know my clients’ kids’ names. I want to remember the neighborhood they bought in. I want to see them at the froyo place after school.
I told Nika I sometimes feel self-conscious about the size of my book — and then I realized last year that the size is by design. Small, deliberate, deeply local. That’s the whole point. If you’re a loan officer who closes two loans a month and helps two families in your community get into a home they actually love, that is not a small thing. That is the thing.
Two kinds.
Debt-consolidation refinances, where someone accidentally over-financed their life on credit cards or a car loan, and we use the home they already own to give them air to breathe. Their mortgage payment goes up; their total monthly debt service drops by a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars. That changes a household.
And divorcing women who walk in terrified because, almost word for word every time, my husband handled everything. Walking someone from that level of financial fear to a confident closing — and looping in a CPA or an attorney when the question isn’t mine to answer — is one of the most meaningful things I get to do in this job.
Sit on the broker side. We have control over our schedules, our compensation, and our calendar in a way the retail bank seat doesn’t allow. You don’t need a hundred-loan-a-month production goal to make this work for your family. You can build a practice the size of your life — not a life around the size of your practice.
A young woman at WMN’s Nashville gathering last fall said she was afraid to have kids because of what it would do to her sales production. I think about that comment a lot. The honest answer is that the broker side is exactly where you can do both. My kids are three and six. They still need me after school. The work shapes around that, not the other way around.
The other thing I told Nika: my first WMN conference was Vegas in 2023, and I was scared to go. I had to leave a still-nursing baby to get on the plane. When I got there, women I’d never met said come sit right here. That changed the trajectory of my business and, honestly, my sense of not being alone in this work.
If you’re a woman in mortgage and you haven’t found that community yet — come and sit with us. There’s room.
Episode 20 of the Women’s Mortgage Network Podcast — Meredith Herr & Nika Ojo
If anything in here lands and you’d like to talk through your own situation, you can schedule a thirty-minute call any time.