Her Savvy, Multilingual Talent Shine : Real Estate Agent a ‘1-Woman Show’

A quick drive down 11th Street, just east of Harbor Boulevard, reveals two blocks of modest, aging duplexes and fourplexes and a crop of new apartments under construction at the Santa Ana edge of Little Saigon.

Look a little harder and you might discern the stamp of Anh Nhu Nguyen--a multilingual real estate agent whose specialty is finding chunks of investment property for largely Vietnamese clients.

Every residential building on 11th Street between Harbor Boulevard and Jackson Street is owned by a client of Nguyen, and it was she who arranged the purchases.

She steers and points and reminisces: That duplex, over there, sold in 1986 for $170,000 to one of her clients. It’s now listed again--through her, of course--for $240,000.

And that apartment complex across the street is one that Nguyen is helping to plan and develop. It has 12 apartment units with four to five bedrooms each, units that cater to the needs of extended families typical of Southeast Asians.

“Before, in this area, not many people wanted to come and live,” she says. “Now it is much cleaner, much, much better. . . . If anything is for sale, I come and bring

investors. We know we can clean up the area and make it go up in value.”

Anh Nguyen is fluent in English, French and Vietnamese and figures that 70% of her business comes from among Orange County’s Vietnamese and Chinese residents, whose ranks have swelled--along with their savings--in the past decade.

Small, independent real estate agencies have long been active in Orange County’s ethnic enclaves. But what sets Nguyen, and the growing number of real estate agents like her, apart is that she symbolizes the efforts of large, mainstream companies to reach out to the area’s burgeoning minority communities.

Nguyen is one of a dozen multilingual agents working for ERA Star Real Estate Center in Fountain Valley, specifically recruited by franchise owner Larry Gage. Five years ago, Gage embarked on an aggressive recruitment effort when he returned from a trip to Japan.

“I hired a Japanese agent who spoke fluent Japanese and made a point to know about the Japanese market,” Gage said. “It’s a conscious effort. The Pacific Rim--that’s where the future is.”

Other major real estate firms, including Coldwell Banker Residential Real Estate and Grubb & Ellis Co., have followed suit. In all, agents of the three big companies speak more than 30 languages--from Afrikaans to Vietnamese.

Four years ago, Coldwell Banker started a toll-free international language line for prospective buyers. The line has since folded because of lack of interest, and company officials have rethought their efforts. Now, specific neighborhood offices are staffed with real estate agents fluent in the languages spoken there.

In addition, Grubb & Ellis’ Irvine office recently has organized a language group--16 real estate agents who speak 15 different languages and dialects. These agents service the ethnic communities and assist fellow brokers with clients who are not fluent in English. The multilingual agents were recruited in the last 18 months in response to the growing number of foreign investors and home-seekers in Irvine.

In her 4 years as a real estate broker in Orange County, Anh Nhu Nguyen has sold everything from $70,000 condominiums for first-time home buyers to $12.5-million commercial properties.

And she attributes her success--which has been swift and significant--in large part to her language skills. For while she survives in English and dreams in French, most of her deals are made in Vietnamese.

Although Nguyen was born in North Vietnam, she spent most of her life in Saigon and its environs. She attended French-run schools in Dalat and later received a pharmaceutical degree.

In Vietnam, Nguyen ran a pharmaceuticals company, but she fled the country when Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975. She headed for Paris, where she earned another pharmaceutical degree, ran a pharmacy and later worked for a large drug company.

But by 1981, Nguyen had settled in Orange County at the urging of her family. She is one of more than 150,000 Southeast Asians who make Orange County their home.

“After 13 years, they (the refugees) start having some money, some savings,” Nguyen says. “The best way for them to feel at home is to own something in this country--a piece of land, a house.”

It is only since 1987 that Nguyen has seen significant numbers of Vietnamese residents able to afford homes and sophisticated investments in land and commercial property, she said. In addition, she said, many have given up hope of returning to Vietnam and have resigned themselves to settling in the United States.

What that has meant for her is business, and a lot of it.

In the third quarter of 1988, Nguyen sold $29 million worth of commercial and residential real estate, according to Kansas-based ERA. That is $12 million more than the top sales associate posted chainwide in 1987, company officials said.

In all, Nguyen figures that she sold about $40 million worth of property in 1988 and earned in the neighborhood of $1 million in commissions.

To put Nguyen’s income level in perspective, statistics from the California Assn. of Realtors show that the median annual income for a residential real estate broker in California is about $35,000.

And sales are not all she does. Nguyen also serves as developer for many of her clients’ investment projects, and she runs a repair and maintenance service for her clients’ income properties. Two assistants, a home office and a purse phone help, but her work days still stretch from about 7 a.m. to midnight.

“Annie does not tell someone that she cannot or will not, or that she’ll find someone else to do it instead,” said Sherry Marlar, executive vice president of ERA Star in Fountain Valley. “She does it herself. She’s a one-woman show.”

There are few communities in Orange County in which Nguyen is not involved, but much of her work centers on Fountain Valley, Garden Grove and Santa Ana. She currently is developing strip malls on Brookhurst Street and Harbor Boulevard, a small tract of homes near Mile Square Regional Park in Fountain Valley, and condominium complexes in Garden Grove.

Dr. Quynh Kieu, a pediatrician in Fountain Valley, is one of the investors in Nguyen’s Brookhurst Street mall and has worked with Nguyen for the past 2 years.

“Real estate is a favored investment tool in the Southeast Asian community,” Kieu said. “We have been proven right by the stock market crash. And Anh responds very well to the needs of our group, especially to my needs.”