Taking mom’s advice pays off for broker

She got the receptionist’s job at CTX Mortgage, marking her entry into the industry. She offered no resistance to mom’s suggestion, she noted. “I was ready for things to change,” she said.

From waiting tables to learning the mortgage trade

It beat waiting tables, Solari said, and she steadily rose up the ranks of the mortgage company. “I ended up moving my way into different positions,” she said. “I went from receptionist to closing assistant, so I helped with title and insurance orders. I did a little bit of loan officer assistant work. They put me where they needed, but when they did that, I was able to learn all the processes.”

Her meteoric rise was interrupted when the Great Recession hit, she said. By 2007, she was laid off and took a job at a publishing for nine months. Once the dust of the mortgage meltdown began to settle, she said her old manager asked her to return to train as a processor.

“I came back, and they taught me how to process,” she said. “An originator came on board two years later in 2010 and said, ‘I’d love for you to be on my team, on the sales side,’ and I was a team loan officer assistant.”

That originator would loom large in her career, she said: “I kind of built my career the way she did – doing the loans nobody else wants to do – the credit repair buyers, the ones that don’t know where to start. We had pipelines of people who would hang around for months and years at a time.”