For Lisa Peters, Homeownership Is a Passion Project

I think I can definitively say Lisa Peters of Caliber Home Loans has her pulse on Dallas real estate. As sponsor of the weekly High Caliber Home of the Week, I’ll email her to ask if she’s got any particular homes or agents to suggest and she always has the best homes to share.

Beautiful, interesting, historic, or iconic, she knows about them all. It’d already be impressive if those were homes that she had done the loans for. A handsome portfolio of homes. But these are usually homes that haven’t hit the market yet. That tells me she works with some of the best agents who earn impressive listings AND she keeps up with them on a regular basis to know what inventory is going on the market.

Lagniappe for Your Clients

Peters works well with agents because she used to be one. The Metroplex native began as a real estate agent in the volatile 1980s and worked in real estate management with Ellen Terry Realtors, a successful boutique brokerage that was bought out by Ebby Halliday Companies.

“I lived through the oil market crash and all the booms and busts of the ’80s,” Peters says.

Peters says she owes her start to Murdock Richard, a real estate and mortgage professional who taught an intensive six-week training class every night.

“He instilled in me two important things,” she says. “You have to listen to clients, and then wait to respond to them.” That meant listening to what they really need, what their situation is, and what they need your help with.

He also taught Peters one of his favorite Cajun words or sayings: lagniappe, a noun that means a little extra.

“He believed in doing a little more than expected,” she says. “Lagniappe for your clients.”

The Oak Cliff ‘Oh’

Peters is understandably passionate about homeownership. “For years, my mission has been to help as many people possible get into a home,” she says.

She bought her first home in Oak Cliff at age 21 with down payment help from her grandmother. “I didn’t know anything about taking care of a house, but I learned along the way,” she says.

Of course, Oak Cliff wasn’t the hot spot that it is today. When she moved to Oak Cliff in 1983, she was working at an upscale boutique brokerage in Highland Park.

“So when I told people I lived in Oak Cliff, they’d say, ‘Oh!’ with a surprise in their voice,” Peters says. “We called it the Oak Cliff Oh. But I’ve seen Oak Cliff really transform over the years.”

Today Peters and her husband Howard Millner live in a 1954-built home on a three-quarters acre lot, full of trees and high on a hill in east Kessler Park. She loves the history and tapestry that homes and neighborhoods have in her part of town, and cherishes one particular lore about her street in Kessler Park.

“The street I live on, it is the widest street in Kessler Park,” she says. “The developer of the neighborhood built his house on this street and he designed the street very wide for a reason. He wanted to be able to turn around his big Cadillac without backing up.”