Cynthia Brugge

SD Realtors’ broker is Cynthia Brugge, has been consulting clients and designing real estate transactions for over thirty years. She has dedicated her career to helping people gather the facts they need to review the financial implications of their decisions and then helping them execute a plan of action. Though licensed as a real estate broker all of this time, Cynthia has concentrated on developing her expertise as a mortgage broker. In September 2008, Cynthia decided to expand her scope of real estate services into real estate brokerage.

A graduate from The University of Texas At Austin in 1979 with a BBA in Real Estate, Cynthia was actually licensed in 1975 when she graduated from Plano High School. Her mother, Cecil Parsons was a local Realtor® in Plano so Cynthia gained sales experience before she attended the University. After she graduated, she worked for a commercial development company for one year and then returned to Plano to sell real estate.

She quickly realized that she had a unique talent in the financing sector of the real estate industry and so she opened the first mortgage brokerage firm in Dallas in 1982 called Mortgage Consultants, Ltd. At the time, mortgage brokers did not exist but Cynthia saw that there was a need for unbiased information about financing because interest rates were dropping from 16% to 14% and lenders were selling all kinds of adjustable rate mortgage products, 3-2-1 buydowns, negatively amortizing loans and graduated payments loans. With her BBA, she was able to analyze the mortgages and discern the risks involved in each choice. She developed a reputation for pure information that removed the sales pitch from the picture and enabled her clients to make solid decisions based on the facts. Cynthia referred to herself as “the original idea of a mortgage broker” and she was doing something that very specialized and that met an important need in the Dallas market.

Cynthia called the underwriters of banks and savings and loans throughout the Dallas market and she learned how to match consumers with underwriters who could make the loans. She would interview a client and prepare a loan package for them. Then she would shop rates and underwriters until she found the best fit for them. She saved them hours of time from having to shop around and also buffered them from the confusing marketing techniques that lured many consumers into terribly expensive loan products that were not the best fit for them.

She also developed relationships with second lien companies and was the first loan officer to combine first and second liens as a standard practice to avoid mortgage insurance and to enable clients to combine conforming first liens with second liens to meet jumbo loan limits at a lower cost. Today, the 80-10-10 is a common term in the industry but not when Cynthia was already doing them.

Cynthia was also the first broker in the Dallas market to share the concept of the “no cost refinance” with her clients saving them thousands of dollars over the following twenty years. Where her competition was selling their clients refinances that cost thousands of dollars each time they refinanced, her clients were refinancing for free. This turned out to be a huge impact because rates were dropping from 10% to 9.25% when the no cost loan emerged in the market but as everyone knows, rates continued to drop from 1990 to 2013 and many consumers refinanced multiple times. There is no telling how much equity was lost to refinances due to multiple refinances where $1000’s were rolled into the mortgage each and every time they refinanced. Cynthia still receives calls from clients all of the time. Now, their children are becoming consumers and she is helping the next generation of buyers.

Now, in addition to her mortgage consulting, Cynthis is a full time real estate broker.