RE/MAX Affiliate Makes History in Support of AAPI Community

When Lisa Nguyen felt there needed to be better representation in local real estate policy for the AAPI community, she took matters into her own hands.

Now, she is the first woman of AAPI heritage to hold a voting seat on the Board of Directors with the Denver Metro Association of REALTORS® (DMAR) in Colorado. After navigating a six-year-long process, which entailed lobbying, advocating, and navigating a plethora of hurdles, she successfully secured a permanent seat for the Asian Real Estate Association of America (AREAA) on DMAR’s Board of Directors. This means that the growing population of Asian individuals and families in the state’s capital city will have better representation when it comes to their real estate needs – and a strong voice helping to ensure fair housing practices are being upheld.

Having experienced housing discrimination herself, Nguyen knows the importance of stepping up on behalf of her community. As the team leader of the International Group with RE/MAX Professionals in Lakewood, her real estate business model and external advocacy work are focused on inclusion.

Forming a multicultural real estate team

When Nguyen joined RE/MAX Professionals, she did so with a vision to expand the brokerage’s cultural reach and help nearby communities navigating the homebuying and selling processes with language barriers.

“When I came into [RE/MAX Professionals], leadership supported me in starting a team that did both residential and commercial real estate transactions, but also represented the diversity in our community. I wanted a team of agents that speak different languages so that we could service a greater amount of people,“ recalls Nguyen, who was recently named a RISMedia Newsmaker for 2021. “To date, we have 16 team members and seven different languages are spoken among us, including Vietnamese, Korean, Mandarin Cantonese, French, Spanish and Tagalog.“

In 2021, the International Group earned entry into the RE/MAX Diamond Club, having earned more than $1M in gross commissions in a single calendar year. Noting that her team serves all communities, including the LGBTQ+ community, Nguyen says her team doesn’t necessarily service any specific neighborhoods but instead the communities who deserve unwavering support.

“A lot of people we help own small businesses, from restaurants to nail salons to liquor stores. In addition to residential and commercial, we focus on the international aspect of real estate. We’re able to utilize the RE/MAX network to connect our buyers and sellers throughout the world,” she says. “A lot of times, people are coming from other countries wanting to invest their money here, or immigrants speak different languages and need assistance in their transaction in their first language. We don’t just understand the business, we understand the culture of those we serve.”

Creating opportunity through involvement with AREAA

For Nguyen, the impetus to get into housing policy from her longtime real estate career was joining AREAA on a local level, where involvement ignited a passion for advocacy. Since joining the Greater Denver Chapter of AREAA, she’s served as President, sat on the policy committee and remains an active member.

A nonprofit trade organization, AREAA – with more than 17,000 members in the U.S. – exists to improve the lives of members of the AAPI community through homeownership. RE/MAX is a partner of AREAA and sponsors the annual “State of Asia America Report,” which provides crucial insights into homeownership trends, statistics and barriers within the AAPI community.

Nguyen shares that the information learned, and connections formed, through involvement with AREAA ultimately benefit her business.

“My team just wants to educate people,” she says. “I think the most important thing is that we are a resource to other people for real estate needs, local information and more.”

Ensuring ongoing representation for AAPI real estate needs

Nguyen was integral in forming the Community Alliance Committee (CAC) for DMAR that’s dedicated to fair housing and inclusion. The committee’s impact has been significant as DMAR – with over 8,500 members – is the largest REALTOR® organization in Colorado. This initiative then inspired other real estate organizations throughout the state of Colorado to jumpstart their own diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) committees and take a more serious approach to diversity efforts.

When Nguyen joined AREAA in 2016, she decided to join forces on the mission of attaining a seat on the DMAR Board of Directors – and wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“People who aren’t apart of minority communities often don’t understand the impact of what the community is going through,” Nguyen explains. “For the AAPI community specifically, we have some of the highest household incomes statistically, yet our levels of homeownership are lower than our Caucasian counterparts. Some of those gaps are because of a lack of fair housing practices being upheld, language inaccessibility and alternative credit being used.”

She continues, “I had been lobbying and educating people on the fact that the AAPI community is growing significantly in the United States. Asian people are one of the fastest growing minority groups in terms of homebuying power in the country, so I couldn’t understand why there wouldn’t be a seat at the table for us.”

Nguyen wants to prevent others from facing housing discrimination, something her family experienced on a personal level. The subject is especially critical this May, which is AAPI Heritage month in the U.S. – a time period dedicated to unpacking history, celebrating the accomplishments of, and understanding the adversity faced by, the AAPI community.

“This advocacy work can be exhausting,” she confesses. “When I have to talk about the discrimination my family went through, it’s like opening up a wound. But I realized at some point, it’s not about me – it’s about my community. And if I don’t do this work, then who’s going to do it?”

In the wake of finally securing a seat for AREAA on the DMAR Board of Directors, Nguyen shares that an alternate route would have been trying to get elected herself as a representative so she could be the voice, for a set period of time, of the Denver-based AAPI community in real estate. But that would not have guaranteed a permanent seat on the Board of Directors for others to assume, and Nguyen’s goal was to secure a lasting solution that continues to advocate for equality in housing.

“DMAR now has the first [REALTOR® association] Board of Directors in the whole United States to have permanent seats for the major minority communities, the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals (NAHREP), the National Association of Real Estate Brokers (NAREB), AREAA and the LGBTQ+ Real Estate Alliance,” Nguyen says.

“This is history in the making.”

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