How one wholesale lender serves the Mandarin-speaking market and what they've learned
While the majority of mortgage customers in the United States speak English, it is not the only language spoken in many households across the country.
To reach customers who speak English as a second language (ESL), brokers and lenders work to reach customers in their native language.
Dan Richards (pictured top), president of wholesale lender Flyhomes, saw an opportunity to reach the Mandarin-speaking community. After English and Spanish, Chinese is the most spoken language in California and Washington state, where Flyhomes was founded. The company hosts a Mandarin version of its website alongside its English version.
“That was kind of an organic opportunity that came about really early on in our history as a company,” Richards told Mortgage Professional America. “We started in Seattle, and pretty early on, expanded into Northern and Southern California, where there's a pretty large Mandarin-speaking population. We naturally attracted some really phenomenal agents and loan officers who were Mandarin speakers and started to develop a following.”
“We focused a lot on Mandarin-specific content and the journey for foreign nationals and the experience that they had in buying homes here, especially along the west coast and then expanding that nationwide. And that's been a really loyal following for us.”
Reaching ESL communities
Brokers have also been working hard to reach customers who don’t speak English as a first language. In many cases, it is brokers themselves who have immigrated to the United States and are looking to help others who speak the same language.
Stella Khavo, a loan officer at Edge Home Finance, came to the United States from Vietnam in 2022. She not only helps customers get through the homebuying process, but also helps them with immigration paperwork.
“I do immigration documents for them too,” Khavo said. “For people who need my help, like with green card issues and citizenship issues, I have resources. I make myself a very resourceful person so that my clients can depend on me. I'm here as an immigrant; I can help people who have the same situation.”
Mortgage executive Tony Thompson, founder and CEO of the National Association of NAMMBA, identifies the "multicultural market" as a significant growth opportunity for mortgage brokers, estimating its value at $2.9 trillion over the next three years.https://t.co/tyYpZdoRV7
— Mortgage Professional America Magazine (@MPAMagazineUS) August 14, 2025
George Missiha is a mortgage broker for GM Brokerage Home Loans. He came to the United States from Egypt in 1997 and has gathered over a million views on social media with his Arabic-language videos about mortgages.
“America is a land of opportunity, and a lot of people are coming in and they speak a different language,” Missiha said. “A lot of people in our industry, they need to learn a second language. We have parents who don’t know anything about (English). They sign and sign and that’s it. English is a second language.”
Meet them where they are
Richards has not only brought in native Mandarin speakers, but has turned to the Chinese messaging service WeChat to reach customers.
“Over the years, we have developed a lot of integrations with WeChat where a lot of communication happens,” he said. “We can even essentially originate over WeChat. It’s been a lot of fun to figure out.”
He believes the work they’ve done with the Mandarin community can allow them to reach other ESL communities nationwide.
“As we've expanded nationwide, we've taken some of those lessons and are still identifying opportunities to go deep with other communities as well,” Richards said. “I think there's a playbook there that can serve different ethnicities, different communities, different people. They have unique needs that aren't served especially well by a generalized approach.”
His advice to brokers who are looking to reach more niche markets is to get to know the people in the community. It takes authenticity and trust to prove that you are there to help them, and that they are more than a transaction to you.
“Two big takeaways for us are one, meet them where they are,” he said. “If they're spending their day in WeChat, we're going to meet them in WeChat. Two, if you really want to go after a certain market, especially if it's a foreign community, it requires a lot of strategic foresight into the people that you have on your team.”
Part of that foresight includes hiring native speakers to build trust with the ESL community.
“If I were going to a community like the Mandarin-speaking community and had folks that did not natively speak Mandarin, but had learned it and maybe could get by, there probably wouldn't be quite as much trust built or established early on,” Richards said. “There is a tremendous amount of trust in having native Mandarin-speaking agents and loan officers who, over time, were able to build that trust. It was a very authentic experience from the get-go.”
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