17 minute read
REAL ESTATE
REAL ESTATE Mortgage brokers are attracted by job flexibility
by Carlito Pablo
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Anine-to-five job doesn’t work for everyone.
There are people who hate being tied to a desk during normal business hours from Monday to Friday.
For those seeking flexibility, a career in the mortgage industry could be their ticket to freedom.
“People don’t always like traditional employment, where you work for an employer and you’re accountable to a boss,” Samantha Gale told the Straight in a phone interview.
Gale, a lawyer, is the CEO of the Canadian Mortgage Brokers Association–B.C. It’s a nonprofit Vancouver-based organization that, according to its website, supports and enhances ‘professionalism and ethical standards within the mortgage industry.’ ”.
She also holds the same title with the Mortgage Brokers Institute of B.C., a related organization that provides training.
As a broker, “you are your own boss”, Gale said.
“They like the independence,” she said about those entering the field. “They like the ability to make their own income.”
Brokers work as an intermediary between a lender, typically banks, and a person who wants to borrow money to buy real estate.
If a real-estate transaction were a relay race, Gale said, brokers are found at the start of the race, assessing how much a person can borrow.
Brokers also often work with borrowers for a period of time well ahead of applying for a loan, by helping them with a plan to save for a down payment or improve their credit rating.
Their services are likewise needed when a homeowner renews the mortgage or refinances the loan.
To become a broker, one must take and pass the mortgage-brokerage course offered by UBC’s Sauder School of Business. Then one has to be hired by a brokerage firm, which sponsors the individual’s application for a licence before the B.C. Financial Services Authority (BCFSA), which is the provincial regulator.
The Mortgage Brokers Institute of B.C., for its part, offers a practical course that covers topics not included in the UBC course. Although the course is not mandatory, it teaches newcomers how to go about their new job.
A successful application with the BCFSA means that the person is now what is called a submortgage broker. That individual has to work with an established brokerage company for two years before being able to work as a fullfledged mortgage broker.
“Most of the time, you, as a sub-broker, are paying a desk fee or a percentage to the brokerage to work there,” Gale noted. “There are some [sub]mortgage brokers who will work for salary. Most don’t, but it’s not unheard of.”
Brokers are different from so-called mortgage advisors or specialists who work at banks.
Gale explained that these advisors or specialists are typically trained by the banks, and they are not accountable to the BCFSA.
“If there’s a problem with a mortgage specialist, they just get fired,” she said.
According to Gale, some mortgage advisors or specialists leave the bank, go through the licensing process, and become submortgage brokers and, eventually, mortgage brokers.
As brokers, they have access to many lending institutions and are not limited to offering the products of one bank.
“They make more money. They’ll have a bigger commission than a mortgage specialist,” Gale said.
Brokers are paid a commission by the lender. According to Gale, that commission may be 0.75 percent to one percent of the loan.
Depending on the arrangement with the brokerage, a submortgage broker gets to keep much of the commission.
“It is a business where you make your own living; you make your own money,” Gale said.
Submortgage brokers can spend most of their time outside the brokerage office, meeting people and making connections.
“That’s part of being your own boss,” Gale said.
Successful brokers are individuals who know how to build a base of clients and generate new contacts.
Except for young people whose families own or manage a brokerage, she said, it’s rare for high school students to think about becoming a broker.
“It’s something that they fall into, probably later in life, when they’ve had some real-world experience,” Gale said.
Gale noted that there are a lot of parents with young kids who find that careers in the mortgage industry are well suited to family life.
“They can drop what they’re doing and they can go and pick their kids up from school at three o’clock in the afternoon,” Gale said, “whereas if they’re at a salaried position with an employer, they cannot just take off and leave.” g
Samantha Gale is a lawyer and the CEO of the Canadian Mortgage Brokers Association-B.C.
– Samantha Gale
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FOOD Siblings honour their family’s restaurant history
Bodega on Main won’t let the pandemic derail a dad’s legacy or its Dine Out Vancouver participation
by Carlito Pablo
Natalie Rivas left a career in banking and finance to join her brother in launching a new restaurant in Vancouver.
In September 2015, she and sibling Paul opened Bodega on Main, which specializes in Spanish cuisine.
The establishment at 1014 Main Street brought back some of the favourite dishes from the La Bodega Restaurante & Tapas Bar.
The former La Bodega was cofounded by their father, Francisco. It operated downtown for 43 years, from 1971 to 2014, until its Howe Street location was acquired by a property developer.
The Rivas siblings added their own touch to the new place, much to the pleasure of their patriarch.
“We’ve always strived to honour the past but look toward the future and make our dad proud,” Rivas told the Straight in a phone interview from the restaurant.
Not long after Bodega on Main opened, their father passed away, in December 2016.
Four years later, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, battering the restaurant industry.
“It’s not an easy time,” Rivas said.
She said that Bodega on Main closed temporarily on March 16. It resumed dine-in services on May 22 with reduced capacity. Glass barriers have been installed between tables.
“We’re a resilient industry, and so, you know, we just have to persevere and do our best to get it through the other side,” Rivas said. “It has been challenging, for sure, for all of us.”
According to her, Bodega on Main is “blessed with an exceptional and loyal staff”.
“We’ve truly been in this together as a team,” Rivas said.
Bodega on Main is one of more than 330 restaurants participating in this year’s Dine Out Vancouver Festival.
The festival, organized by Tourism Vancouver, runs from February 5 to March 7.
For this celebration of food and drink, Bodega on Main is offering a takeout dinner for two. The package includes salad, one selection from three paella dishes, churros for desert, and a bottle of red or white wine—all for $65.
Rivas recalled that the restaurant tried the same menu during the Dine Outside Vancouver event in 2020, the summer version of Dine Out.
“It worked well, so we thought we’d do the same for this year’s festival,” she said.
While growing up, the Rivas siblings were involved in the old La Bodega.
Paul worked everywhere, from the kitchen to the dining floor and the office. By the time the place closed down in 2014, he was the general manager.
Rivas, for her part, worked as a hostess while in postsecondary studies.
“I finished university and went into banking, so it wasn’t until we opened here that I came back,” Rivas said.
It will take more than a pandemic to stop the Rivas siblings from carrying on with an honoured family tradition. “I’m a hundred percent here,” Rivas said. g
A brother and sister founded Bodega on Main (right) after working in their father’s legendary La Bodega restaurant. Sautéed prawns with garlic, chilies, and sherry (left) are on the tapas menu.
– Natalie Rivas
Fresh St. Market carries on century-old tradition
by Charlie Smith
At Fresh St. Market, food isn’t simply fuel that people pick up and consume before carrying on with the rest of their day. It’s an experience— with outlets offering a original and very extensive mix of artisan baked goods, including the celebrated Mile High Cinnamon Buns and Bavarian Pretzels, which are baked fresh every day. That’s along with bountiful bins of colourful fruits and vegetables under the banner “Eat the Rainbow”, along with numerous premade salads and a fresh meat selection that can match any specialty store.
The premium on unprocessed food at Fresh St. Market is apparent upon entering any of the four Metro Vancouver stores. In West Van, for instance, the first thing customers encounter is the gigantic and spacious produce section. In the Vancouver store, it’s the baked goods, with the fresh produce immediately to the right.
“I think what we’re trying to do here is focus on fresh— and give the customer excellent service,” the Vancouver store leader, Glen Young, tells the Straight by phone. “I like the idea of the produce being first because I think produce is a destination. People come to your store for produce.”
Young spoke in advance of the Vancouver store’s looming first-year anniversary on Saturday (February 6). Located at 1423 Continental Street in the Bjarke Ingels–designed Vancouver House project, the 15,000-square feet of retail floor space is in a rapidly evolving neighbourhood on the southern edge of the downtown peninsula.
“You can walk out the door down to Beach Avenue, and within two minutes, you’re at English Bay,” Young says.
Because it’s not as large as other outlets, the Fresh St. Market store in Vancouver makes the most of its space by placing cashiers in a row along the western wall behind screens. Customers line up and then approach whichever one is available first, like in a clothing store, and then head out sideways toward the exit.
“It’s a different style of lining up like that,” Young says. “It seems to work for us.”
The company reinforces its brand on the Fresh St. Market YouTube channel. There, chef Stu Smith shares some of his recipes, such as beef gravy and Yorkshire pudding. The channel also includes videos of him judging rather amusing back-to-back cooking competitions between Whitecaps players.
The Vancouver Fresh St. Market outlet also has an instore restaurant, Fork Lift Kitchen & Bar. “What other grocery store can you go to and have an amazing burger and a glass of wine or a beer?” Young asks.
Fresh St. Market is owned by Georgia Main Food Group, which operates the grocery operations of locally owned H.Y. Louie Co. Limited. Georgia Main’s name pays tribute to the founding of the family business at 255 East Georgia Street back in 1903. Created by H.Y. Louie as an intermediary between Chinese gardeners and white grocers, the company continues to thrive as one of B.C.’s longest-lasting family enterprises. g
Produce is at centre stage in Vancouver’s Fresh St. Market, continuing a family tradition that started here back in 1903.
LIQUOR February is for taking it easy with your reset liver
by Mike Usinger
Congratulations—you made it and should be proud, even if your fellow liquor nerds wonder why anyone would subject themselves to a straight month of misery.
Dry January is over, leaving only the grim memories associated with it. The Friday nights where, instead of unwinding with a Cedar Sour to celebrate the week’s end, you made do with a Shirley Temple. Which only reminded you that a healthy splash of gin would turn a Shirley Temple into a pretty decent approximation of a ’70s-chain-restaurant Singapore Sling.
And then there were the daily happy hours that were anything but. When, instead of getting creative with Cardamom Margaritas and Black Walnut Old Fashioneds, fun-time consisted of club soda with a Driscoll’s strawberry plopped in for colour. Or a glass of hyper-local artisanal West Coast tap water with house-made ice cubes.
Thank God you had a pound of Alaskan Thunder Fuck and a bong shaped like the head of Jack Daniel to get you through the month.
Now that you’re ready to get back at it with the cocktail shaker, the break will have changed your relationship to alcohol. When you drink, especially on a daily basis, you build up a tolerance, leading to a diminished physical response when imbibing.
Blame your body for that. We’re wired by evolution to metabolize mind-altering substances more efficiently over time. The more you drink, the more you have to drink to recapture the feeling of your first alcohol experiences. And that becomes a losing battle as your tolerance grows.
But one of the miracles of the human liver is that it has the capacity to reset itself. Stop drinking for a while—i.e. a Dry January— and your tolerance drops. Or, to put things in less academic terms, getting a buzz becomes a lot easier after an extended period of abstinence, meaning you no longer need four Paralyzers, a Tequila Sunrise, and a couple of Zombies with a 151 float to cultivate something resembling a pleasant glow. Yes, there is at least one benefit to Dry January. The challenge is to avoid turning your return to drinking into Fucking Wasted February. And that means easing back into things with your cocktail choices.
Avoid the heavy hitters like classic Margaritas (2 oz of tequila with a triple sec kicker) and Long Island Ice Tea (nearly 4 oz of booze, with vodka, white rum, silver tequila, gin, and triple sec all attending the bridge-and-tunnel-people party at TGIF’s). And it’s probably best to take a pass on the classics that are stirred instead of shaken, including the Manhattan, Brooklyn, Longshoreman, and Vodka Martini.
There’s also zero point scaling back the alcohol your favourite cocktail calls for. To skimp on the rum in a Painkiller is to upset the natural balance of things—kind of like how your grandfather insists on adding an extra two cups of water to his Bel-Air frozen concentrated orange juice to “make it go further”. That said juice tasted like someone melted an orange crayon in a jug of swamp water was your problem, because it never bothered him.
Consider that there are plenty of cocktails that make use of the bottles in your liquor cabinet that aren’t exactly on your daily go-to list. Think crème de menthe, Frangelico, Kahlúa, Amaretto, and Cassis. And let’s not forget the fruit liqueurs in a rainbow of flavours that include, but are hardly limited to, banana, cherry, melon, lychee, apricot, and pomegranate.
What do the above have in common, besides, that is, making uppity Williamsburg bartenders wonder why they exist? They have a lower alcohol-by-volume than whiskies, gins, tequila, and vodkas. Used in cocktails, they’ll lead to drinks that are around 10 percent ABV—similar to a beer, which is to say roughly half the strength of a Margarita.
Build a cocktail around them, and you get the booze in a drink without the lightning-bolt buzz.
Keeping it simple is key. James Bond might have been famous for shaken-notstirred Martinis, but the first drink he ever ordered in Ian Fleming’s franchiselaunching Casino Royale was an Americano (Campari, vermouth, and club soda). The Adonis, which dates back to 1884, definitely looks booze-forward but makes low-alcohol magic out of dry sherry and sweet vermouth.
Don’t be afraid to play around. Take a Brown Cow (1 oz Kahlúa and 2 oz milk) in a new direction by adding a shot of banana liquer or Amaretto to the mix. Or put a Far East spin on a 1960s Blue Lagoon by subbing in Soho lychee liqueur for the vodka.
For this liquor nerd, the Grasshopper is a February go-to—minty, creamy, and stupidly delicious, it dates back to 1918 when it was said to be invented by Philip Guichet at New Orleans’s Tujague bar. All you need is two usually-ignored liqueurs, heavy cream, and some restraint. As much as you’re going to want a refill or three, stick to one per day for the first couple of weeks after Dry January. The last thing your liver needs is a headlong plunge into Fucked Up February.
GRASSHOPPER 1 oz crème de menthe 1 oz white crème de cacao 1 oz heavy cream Pour all ingredients into a cocktail shaker over ice. Shake and strain into a martini glass. g
The Grasshopper is delicious without being potent. Photo by Kike Salazar/Unsplash.
Slim’s BBQ rides into the heart of Mount Pleasant
by Mike Usinger
Considering we only get one goround, why in the hell would you waste it on things like kale drizzled in lemon juice, sodium-free granola skewers, or skinless chicken breast with H2O reduction? You know where that kind of eating doesn’t fly? Texas. And Vancouver’s Main Street, at least in the 2300 block of fabulously hip Mount Pleasant.
This month marked the opening of Slim’s BBQ on the coolest Vancouver street not named Commercial Drive or Fraser. The Austin, Texas–style barbecue joint is in the former location of the sadly-departed Rumpus Room.
For this incarnation of the spot, gone is the Rumpus’s Pac-Man/Donkey Kong video game, straight-from-the-’70s macramé pot hangers and framed faded photo of hairierthan-Ron-Jeremy Olympic Medalist Mark Spitz. Instead, say hello to Texas-steer longhorns, corrugated-tin walls, and westernsaloon wagon-wheel chandeliers.
But even more than the Lone Star State ambience, it’s the food you’re probably after. Like Chicharrón seasoned pork rinds. Texas red chili with cornbread. The hot friedchicken sandwich with habanero mayo. Or the southern staple chicken and waffles with Jack Daniel’s maple syrup and gravy.
As one might assume, given we’re talking Texas, there’s also plenty of wood-smoker fare. Carnivores can build their own platters by opting for house-smoked brisket, peachchipotle-glazed pork ribs, and buttermilkmarinated fried chicken, and then accessorizing with buttermilk biscuits, serrano cheese spinach, or smoked-brisket beans.
Cocktails include the Quick Draw (Jim Beam, mint, sour cherries), Rum Martinez (Sailor Jerry’s, vermouth, Luxardo, Grand Marnier), and Vaquero Old Fashioned (Vamonos! Mezcal, agave, bitters). In a nod to the early settlers of modern-day Mount Pleasant, there also the Two Step pairing of a Pabst Blue Ribbon with a shot of Jameson.
Slim’s BBQ is brought to you by the team of Christina Cottell, Shoel Davidson, and David Duprey, whose ventures have included, in no particular order, Key Party, Dixie’s BBQ, the Narrow, and the Rumpus Room. “There’s a seat at the table for everybody at Slim’s,” Duprey says of the vibe they’re going for. “We have created a relaxed eatery and bar where anyone from families with kids, to solo diners, to couples on date nights is welcome.”
And although he doesn’t say it, you might want to think twice about dragging along a date who’ll look at the menu and ask where the hell the steamed salmon, blanched cauliflower, and organic-flaxseed salad are hiding. Spending time with that particular breed of jackass is just wasting what little time you have left. g
Slim’s serves up Austin, Texas-style barbecue in a setting that is as authentic as the food.
