There is poetic justice in a woman winning $100,000 from the brokerage that secured her mortgage from the bank that originally turned her down.
There is poetic justice in a woman winning $100,000 from the brokerage that secured her mortgage from the bank that originally turned her down.
Maria Martinez is this year’s winner of the Mortgage Alliance Minimize Your Mortgage Sweepstakes, and while she may not describe herself as particularly lucky, her broker does.
“I am the lucky person for her walking into my life as a broker,” says Eduarda ‘Eddie’ Pita, the mortgage agent who added Martinez to her client book in April of last year. “I told Maria, ‘everything has a purpose in life.’”
It all began with divorce proceedings for the Martinez family last year, when Maria was declined by her local bank branch after she applied for a mortgage to pay her husband as part of the separation agreement.
“The bank declined her, and she was referred by the local branch to me,” Pita told MortgageBrokerNews.ca. “I put it back to the bank that declined her, and she was approved by the very same branch.”
Many times people don’t know how to ask the right questions when applying for a mortgage, she says.
Martinez plans to use the money to help pay off her husband on the mortgage, and to take her two daughters, Kayla and Kathy, back to Portugal to visit with relatives.
That’s something $100 can’t buy.
“When I called her and told her she had won, she asked me ‘a hundred dollars?’” laughs Pita. “I told her no, $100,000. She broke into tears.”
The cheque, presented by Mortgage Alliance President and CEO Michael Beckette, represents a total of $600,000 that has been given away in prize money since the contest began in 2007.
