Index
Today
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Checking your clock…
Worked out from your own device clock against the hours below. Nobody is actually at this desk — this is a demonstration site.
| Monday – Thursday | 8am – 6pm |
|---|---|
| Friday | 8am – 3pm |
| Saturday | 9am – noon, by appointment |
| Sunday | Closed. Texts still get read. |
Printed in
Providence, Rhode Island · mortgage broker
I am Nadia Botelho. I place residential mortgages across Rhode Island and the Massachusetts towns on its border — first houses, three-deckers, self-employed files, mill conversions and the ones that need work before anyone will lend on them.
Call or text — it is one phone and one person. No queue, no extension, no “your call is important to us”.
Nadia Botelho · ProvidenceYour local time · the hand is set from your own device clock
Illustrative figures. Nadia Botelho is an invented broker and these numbers are placeholders showing where a real sole practitioner’s own record would sit.
How this actually goes
Six moments that describe the difference between a sole practice and a call centre better than any list of adjectives would.
08:10
Not a form with eleven required fields and a marketing consent checkbox. A text, an email, a voicemail. Whatever you had time for on the way to work.
The form on this site is one screen and two of its fields are required.
09:40
Mostly me asking questions and you answering them. By the end of it I know whether the file is ordinary, and if it is not, I know which part is going to be the awkward one.
Nothing has been submitted anywhere yet. Nothing has been pulled.
11:15
Guidelines get read, a condo questionnaire gets requested, a rent schedule gets checked, two lenders get called. This is the part that separates a broker from a shelf, and it is the part you never see.
14:00
Usually two or three, side by side, with the trade written out — this one is cheaper monthly and costs more over the term, that one closes faster and needs a bigger reserve.
Never one recommendation with the alternatives hidden.
16:30
The person who takes it from here is me. Not a portal, not a rotating queue, not a name you have never heard from a department you cannot reach.
19:45
I answer, or I answer in the morning and tell you it can wait. Both of those are better than not knowing which one it is.
Listed hours are the ones I promise. The rest is habit, not obligation.
Six kinds of file
Not everything, and that is the point. These are the files I have done enough of to know where they go wrong.
Buying a two-, three- or four-unit and living in one of them is the most Rhode Island way there is to own a house.
Two to four unitsRead moreIf you run something, an underwriter is going to read your tax returns differently from the way your accountant wrote them.
Self-employedRead moreA refinance is only ever worth it against a specific date: the month the savings have paid back the costs.
RefinanceRead moreProvidence has a lot of beautiful housing inside buildings that lenders find complicated.
Condos & millsRead morePurchase-rehab financing lends against what the house will be worth when the work is finished, not what it is worth on the day you walk through it.
RenovationRead moreSeven calculators
Every one runs in your browser, keeps its state in the address bar so you can send a result to somebody, and refuses to quote you a rate — because a website cannot know one.
Principal, interest, tax, insurance, association dues and mortgage insurance, itemised.
Read moreIncome and debts against two ratios, and it tells you which one is binding.
Read moreA 2–4 unit with the rental income discounted the way an underwriter discounts it.
Read moreThe call log
Illustrative. These are written situations composed for a demonstration site, not accounts from real clients, and nobody quoted here exists.
A buyer had an accepted offer on a three-decker in the Armory District and a pre-approval from an online lender that had not looked at the rents. Three days before the appraisal it came back short on income.
She rebuilt the file around the rent schedule on a Sunday and told me exactly what would go wrong before it went wrong. Nobody had done that in five months of looking.
Closed on the original date.
A ceramicist with eleven years of Schedule C income and an accountant who had been doing an excellent job of minimising it. On paper she qualified for about half of what she could comfortably afford.
She explained the difference between what my returns say and what my business actually does, and then found a lender who reads it the second way.
Bank-statement program, 12 months of deposits.
A mill conversion on the Woonasquatucket where the association had 41% investor ownership and one owner holding six units. Two lenders declined it after the application had already gone in.
She checked the condo questionnaire before we spent a dollar on an appraisal. That is apparently unusual and I do not understand why.
Placed with a portfolio lender who holds the loan.
A couple refinancing 19 years into a 30-year loan, quoted a new 30-year by their bank. The payment dropped and the total interest went up by more than the closing costs.
She showed us the same loan over 15 years and we saw it in about four seconds. Our own bank had not mentioned it.
15-year term, same payoff decade.
A four-unit in Central Falls that failed the self-sufficiency test on the seller’s stated rents but passed on the appraiser’s rent schedule. The difference was found in week one, not week five.
The whole thing hinged on a document I had never heard of. She had already ordered it.
Closed 38 days after the offer.
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Where I lend
Rhode Island is thirty-seven towns and about an hour end to end. Property tax rates, condo stock, three-decker density and what an appraiser will call a comparable all change inside twenty minutes of driving. A national lender treats that as noise. It is most of the job.
I work across the state and the Massachusetts towns along the border. There is no walk-in office — everything happens by phone, by video, or at your own kitchen table.
This site publishes no street address, no coordinates and no map. Coverage is written out in words in the footer.
Reach me directly
Whatever stage you are at. If it is a house you have not seen yet, that is the useful time.
On a real site this would now be in an inbox with a timestamp on it. Here it went nowhere — nothing was transmitted and nothing was written down.
Reading options
These change how this page renders in your browser. This site has not been formally audited against WCAG, so no conformance level is claimed.
Studio
Everything a visitor sees is the ink tray. This panel is the machinery behind it — it is how a prospect’s own brand gets onto the page in a meeting. Reachable at ?studio=1 or with Shift+B.