BUSINESS PROFILE

DreamSource Mortgage Services:
Dreaming of A Green Future

By Brenda Niemand

After 20 years in mortgage banking, Teresa Lopez fervently believes there’s room for a new approach to what many people regard as a fearsome, intimidating and potentially humiliating experience: applying for a mortgage. She also has an abiding interest in environmental sustainability and green building programs. So two years ago Lopez opened her own business, DreamSource Mortgage Services, to merge these two passions and address a previously unserved niche.
It was serendipity that brought Lopez to Boulder from Washington, D.C. She came to interview a web site designer, but quickly concluded Boulder was the perfect place for her new business. The environment and urban sprawl were on Boulder County’s agenda years before other parts of the country even reconized these as serious issues. The move toward sustainable new urban development was well under way, and the demand for green development was healthy and growing. What better place to start a real-estate operation that wants to be known as “the conscious choice”?
Located at 2737 Mapleton Ave., DreamSource offers a full range of mortgage services, but its forte is creatively meeting a client’s needs with integrity, while offering respect, support and compassion. “There’s such anxiety about money!” Lopez says. “One thing I focus on is creating a relationship and building up-front rapport with clients. I want them to relax, get comfortable and have positive thoughts.”
Lopez has made a career of achieving the impossible, finding solutions to difficult lending challenges such as loans at 100-percent financing. She got the idea for her company’s name from feedback she’s often received: “I never dreamed that this could happen!” “It’s about being the source for dreams,” Lopez contends. Her success has earned her humorous tributes from realtors, including a pin with the words “Loan Goddess” in rhinestones, and a magic wand.

Sustainable Society
Out-of-the-ordinary projects that benefit from DreamSource’s creative funding include alternative architectural designs such as straw bale and dome homes, unique properties, raw land, commercially zoned residential properties, homes with high land value, and homes outside the electrical grid. Lopez has funded an “earthship” house made of tires and aluminum cans, as well as a polystyrene foam dome. “Most people in the industry don’t know how to present these unique situations to underwriters and their investors in order to get them funded,” she says.
That portion of the business plan really excites Lopez. “We want to talk to people who wish to build sustainable homes and communities—developers, landowners, people who want to build their own homes. We want to create the product lines to be able to support that. It’s our future.”
Educating investors is a large part of DreamSource’s challenge, Lopez notes. Although straw bales and dome architecture are becoming more common, proving marketability is still a critical issue. “It isn’t about environmental issues,” Lopez explains. “It’s about value for the investor, about being able to show how the investor could sell this loan to a secondary market if they had to take the house back. We have a fiduciary responsibility to make sure we’re creating a good investment for our investors.”
So Lopez constantly educates bankers and commercial banks. “That’s what I really enjoy doing—bringing that awareness to the marketplace in an industry that hasn’t a clue where it’s going. And where it’s going is our future! We have to create this future, because the earth is our living room and pretty soon it’s not going to have any more room. Creating new urban development, high density, lots of open space, and mixed-use projects is the answer, along with weaving renewable energy into the project.”
Aside from that huge task, Lopez and her partners—a lawyer, a CPA and a social investment industry expert—are busy building professional relationships. “We network our clients who have businesses,” she says, “and all of our resources—realtors, builders, financial planners, CPAs.” She’s also trying to attract like-minded loan officers and others who want to help create a new platform and support sustainable green construction projects. “We work with people who want to make a difference in the world.”
DreamSource hasn’t done much advertising, but networking and word-of-mouth seem to be taking hold. The company already receives a goodly number of calls from landowners interested in building sustainable communities. “New laws being passed will force developers to shift from urban sprawl to new urbanism,” Lopez points out. Her goal is for the mortgage banking industry to be a founder and supporter of this movement.
Lopez brings experience, creativity, hard work and passion to her socially responsible enterprise. She believes she can indeed make a difference in this world by serving clients creatively and compassionately, by advocating and helping facilitate environmental sustainability, and by continuing to dream. “I can’t help it,” she says with a hearty laugh, “I’m just a big-vision person!”