Dallas Area Mortgage Broker Stuns Seminar with Revelation
Dec 30, 2008, 12:21
Conference organizers moved quickly to mute Pennington's divisive image.
DALLAS - According to reports, more than one hundred mortgage professionals were horrified when area mortgage broker, Louise Pennington, publicly claimed that her motivation for originating small commercial loans was the potential to earn large sums of money.
The shocking comment, which occurred at a Dallas Radisson Hotel, halted an education seminar on commercial mortgage lending as the stunned crowd flooded from the hotel ballroom after learning of their colleague’s voracious appetite for additional income.
A former part-time real estate agent and stay-at-home mom, Pennington, 42, enrolled in a Business Building Seminar offered exclusively by commercial lending giant, Lone Star Funding, to learn the basics of its product and how to source and close small commercial loans.
“I didn’t take this job for the personal development or spiritual growth,” Pennington retorted when questioned about her room-clearing remark. “I’m in it for the money; and any broker that tells you otherwise is lying through their $30,000 porcelain veneers.”
According to witnesses, the incident occurred shortly after 9 a.m. when Lone Star Funding seminar leader, Chuck Rivers, randomly asked audience members why they had decided to become mortgage brokers.
“It’s a standard question that I ask at the beginning of every training session I do,” defended Rivers. “Until today, the majority of respondents typically indicated that they wanted to dramatically increase their monetary donations to the church, or generate healthy bursts of income to afford themselves more time for volunteer work. Ms. Pennington’s response was much more blunt and self-serving, and if we were aware of her what’s-in-it-for-me attitude prior to this morning, we would have withheld the free breakfast buffet to dissuade her kind from showing up.”
Many of the seminar attendees fled the hotel immediately following the outburst, unable to continue with the remainder of the day’s agenda, while others feverishly dialed family members from their mobile telephones, reassuring their loved ones that they would be returning home safely later that afternoon.
“I just want to throw my arms around my wife and kids and tell them that everything’s going to be alright,” said one visibly upset mortgage professional. “But the reality is that it’s not alright, and as long as Lone Star continues to breed these infernal upstarts by fouling their minds with obscene thoughts of big commissions and yield spread premiums, things are only going to get worse.”
One woman, too shaken to drive, was waiting for her husband to pick her up outside the hotel’s main entrance.
Despite reassurances, terrified brokers refused to re-enter the convention site.
“I stared into the eyes of a beast today,” said the broker, still trembling from the harrowing experience. “I’ll bet if I got a good look underneath the table, I would have seen a set of cloven hooves and a tail on that woman.”
Texas Association of Mortgage Brokers president, Cyrus “Cy” Hightower, was busy preparing lunch for impoverished men and women in the soup kitchen at Our Mother of Sorrows when he heard the disturbing news. After concluding the ten to two o’clock shift and discarding his hairnet, he issued the following statement: “The TAMB has always been about bringing mortgage brokers together for the betterment of our neighborhoods and small business communities. Today we must be stronger than ever to support those whose lives and families have been affected by this terrible tragedy. We must also look upon the avarice-consumed swine as victims themselves, who need our collective strength to help cure their illness. Only until we are willing to do both can the healing process truly begin.”
Hightower went on to urge local shopkeepers to turn a deaf ear to Pennington’s “greed soaked advances,” instructing them to politely decline the broker’s offer to assist them with commercial financing, and further recommended that they reject her interest in purchasing their merchandise. The latter portion of his advice created an unexpected backlash in “Main Street” sections of the Dallas/Fort Worth area as merchants began bombarding not just Pennington, but all of her Lone Star cohorts with communications advertising special sales, coupons, and rebates reserved exclusively for mortgage professionals.
“I’ve never been so busy,” exclaimed Clarence Bartram, owner of Bartram’s Boot Shack in Carrollton, TX. “Ever since that windbag Hightower tried to keep mortgage brokers away from self-employed guys like me, even my high-end exotic skins like gator and ostrich have been ‘walking out the door’ quicker than all get-out!”
Bartram’s self-proclaimed gift for puns gave him a chuckle, but one person who wasn’t laughing was Pennington’s youngest son, Tyler. Until recently, Tyler Pennington, 12, spent his days and nights under the cozy blanket of his mother’s endless doting. His pre-school afternoons were consumed with watching Sesame Street and assuming the role of “lil’ kitchen helper” as the two whiled away their free time baking chocolate chip cookies, lemon bars, and Rice Krispie Treats®. Once in grade school, the elder Pennington would wait at the bus stop for her son, always greeting him with a hearty snack of carrot sticks and cheese cubes.
“Now that mom has a big, fancy job, those days are gone,” lamented the boy. “With my brothers away at college, the house is empty when I get home. At dinner time, my father and I are lucky to get a Hot Pocket® while mom is out having her leftovers wrapped in a tin foil swan. It’s like we don’t even know her anymore. At least that’s what dad says when he drinks beer in his workshop all night.”
Despite her family’s unhappiness and being shunned by the majority of her industry peers, Mrs. Pennington refuses to deviate from her path of immense wealth and self-indulgence. When asked if she would ever consider designating a portion of her income to more charitable causes, Pennington replied, “I’ve got a twelve year-old and a husband at home, both of whom are hitched to this ol’ lady’s gravy train. If they don’t qualify as charity cases, then I don’t know what does.”
