The Wenatchee World Online:
Would you like a skinny latte with that fixed-rate, 30-year home loan?
Local mortgage broker Angie Coleman Sherman has turned to espresso as a cure for the housing crash.
She opened espresso/bakery A Shot of Gratitude in January in the lobby of her home-loan business, Trusted Home Mortgage.
She also sells real estate and coaches elementary school basketball.
Coffee is a great way to get people in the door, she said. And that’s what she needs these days.
A Chelan native, Coleman Sherman, 41, and her now ex-husband made a good living in the Seattle area “flipping” and selling six homes, starting a mortgage business and cashing in on the real estate boom.
Then came a divorce and last year’s crash.
Her six-figure yearly earnings and retirement funds shriveled. She was faced with raising her 12-year-old son, Jalen Sherman, as a single mom and the need to cover her own real estate investments with money in her dwindling savings account.
“The market basically seized,” she said. “Business slowed way down. People weren’t consuming. Many brokered lenders went out of business. Who could predict that the whole banking industry would implode?”
She returned home to Chelan to regroup, but temporary plans turned permanent.
“I decided, what better place for me to be a single mom than here, surrounded by friends and family,” she said.
With the small-town life has come a scramble for more income.
During the boom, she invested in six area properties, including the building that houses her espresso/home-loan office. She’s managed to keep up with payments.
She got into the espresso business after buying out her partner in an espresso-cart venture for warm-weather sales by the lake.
The machine now produces the “shots of gratitude” she sells from the espresso bar/mortgage office.
Photo by faeryboots