Special promotional content provided by Northpointe Bank.

In the early 2000s, at around age 25, the Northpointe Bank’s Laura Witte was about to realize her childhood fantasy: she was going to buy a house.

As a girl, she’d moved yearly with her mom, a hardworking single parent who’d lost her home to foreclosure when Laura was nine. Into early adulthood, Laura never lived in the same place for very long. But she wanted to. She’d drive down the street looking at houses, imagining living in one of them, someday. It was a dream, something she thought would never happen.

When the time finally came, it was “a really big deal,” she says.

It was a Friday when Laura walked into a Big Bank for a home loan. The loan officer coolly said she would get back to Laura on Monday. But real estate moves fast, and the house could be gone by then.

“They were very cold,” Laura says. “I definitely felt pushed aside.”

That treatment was what inspired Laura, who’s consistently ranked nationally in the top 1 percent of loan officers, to enter the lending business. The former mathlete, who as a little girl would count up all of her pennies—not because she liked money, but because she liked math—decided she could do a better job than the loan officer she’d encountered. From her first days in the lending industry, Laura has advocated for prospective homeowners. Her belief that everyone deserves a loan and a home drives her to dig for hours into the paperwork of “impossible” loans in case something, somewhere, has been missed. Often, something has.

She also helps clients restructure their debt, which could mean anything from taking advantage of equity in an existing home to putting less money down on a new home while paying off credit cards to renegotiating student loan debt.

And as a former nomad, Laura’s home now is more than a house. It’s Atlanta, whose diverse neighborhoods and families make up what she, a Hispanic Jewish woman, calls “my kind of place.” Her appreciation of community and her involvement in several local groups and charities uniquely positions her to understand both the needs of her clients and the local market, and she uses everything she knows to get her clients the best possible deal. She even goes as far as referring them to a different bank if, after running all the numbers and exhausting all possibilities, she knows the other bank’s interest rate is lower.

“This is not a sales job to me,” she says. “It’s looking at somebody’s life. Their home is connected to everything – their family, their sanity, their stress levels. I know how big of a deal it is to buy a house.”

If recent months have revealed anything, it’s the value of feeling confident and secure at home, and little makes a home cozier than not being stressed about unmanageable payments. If you want help with yours, or if you’re dreaming of a new home, contact “mortgage ninja” Laura Witte.