Why we started
Renata Oyelaran spent eight years at a national bank telling people no. Not because the answers were always no, but because the systems she worked inside had no room for the answer that was actually true: not yet, and here is the plan.
Magnolia opened in 2009 with two desks and one rule, which is that a declined file should come with a written path back. That rule is still the reason Carmen spends her week on buyers who are nine months from a closing table rather than nine days.
The second thing we learned, and it took a few years, is that Georgia sets aside real money for first-time buyers and much of it goes unclaimed. Not because buyers do not qualify, but because assistance applications add two to four weeks of work to a loan file and pay a lender nothing extra. Most offices quietly steer people away from them. That is now most of what we do.
