In Irene Mabry's line of work, miracles are a regular occurrence, normally falling on the end of the month when her clients find themselves at the settlement table.

As far as Mabry is concerned, there's no other way to explain that her thriving real estate business is built on one impossible case at a time. It's something she never loses sight of, especially when she finds herself with customers who can't afford cars, who have given up paying their bills, who have a houseful of children, but who are desperately seeking a better way of life.

It's then that she will clasp hands with her buyer, bow her head and offer up a prayer.

"Lord," she'll say, "we need you to touch the hearts of the people who can approve our loan, the hearts of the people who can accept our contract. Lord, we're in a lot of controversy with these bills. "

Mabry specializes in finding homes that most real estate agents don't bother with, for poor people who usually are not seen as customers - even by themselves.

Yet, for the last five years, Mabry has been a member of the Real Estate Million Dollar Association Ltd., an honorary organization of agents who surpass $1 million in sales volume. In today's market - with many homes selling in the hundreds of thousands, reaching $1 million isn't too tall a mountain to climb. But remember, Mabry has gotten there in small steps, with a $40,000 sale here, a $28,000 sale there.

To make those sales, going to great lengths is routine. It's not unusual for Mabry to transport customers who don't have cars, to arrange payment agreements with their frustrated creditors and to wade knee-deep into other people's personal problems.

Mabry doesn't depend on faith. She puts it to work.

Irene Mabry's compassion isn't that of an objective observer, a do-gooder who steps out of her secure world to help others. She's been there. She grew up in the projects in Norfolk, Va. She's been a single mother. She's been homeless. "I learned you can have it all and you can lose it all, and I found myself in the same situation that a lot of people go through," she said.

In an industry driven by economic incentive - commissions to be exact - Irene Mabry of Allen Realty in Pimlico runs on a volatile mixture of financial and spiritual fulfillment. Mabry has turned the sometimes ruthless side of real estate into none other than God's work.

"I really believe in my heart that God places me in these situations with these people, because it's always the worst cases," said the 48-year-old mother of four. "I never get good stuff. I always get the complicated ones. But the complicated ones are more exciting to me because you're doing something to help somebody."

Mabry can't be pigeonholed as a Bible-thumper. Although she may have religious literature stuffed into the console of her car and Bibles in the back seat, she has an artful way of cursing and has a street-savvy eye.

While she's not looking to save souls, she never forgets who truly makes the deal and has no qualms about offering up an itemized request - "We're just doing the footwork. It's the prayer that matters."

It's something she never forgets. It's something she's thinking about right now as she gazes at the dirty outside wall of the Maryland Penitentiary, the overwhelming neighbor of the Latrobe Homes housing project. Confronted with such a view, Mabry wondered out loud how many people from this neighborhood are going to be living one day on the other side of the wall.

Then she glanced toward the project's courtyard, calculating the danger.

Even with the coast clear, Mabry didn't venture out of her car. The last time she did that, a stranger followed her to the door of her buyer, Denise Reives. This time she used her cellular phone.

For more than two years, Mabry has been showing Reives homes in the $40,000 range. Together, they have looked at hundreds of what the low-income housing market offers - flagrant holes in the roof, rooms full of abandoned memories, walls covered with layers of wallpaper, paint and glue.

Yet as Mabry watched Reives make her way to the car, Mabry knew what counts. She had five houses and all it takes is one to turn into a home.

Selling the mean streets

Irene Mabry has transformed her real estate business into a social program. Except here, hardball negotiations and sales have replaced policy and theory.

It works on a premise that buying a home is a form of empowerment, a stable force in deteriorating communities. Her clients are renters, overwhelmed single mothers with children, trapped between corner drug markets and gunbattles. Mabry finds them homes, sometimes stable enclaves in the same embattled community, sometimes homes in neighborhoods that they've seen only from bus windows on the way to work.

To drive with Mabry is to tour Baltimore's hardest-hit neighborhoods, to see people on street corners who are suspicious of strangers in an approaching car. On one tour through West Baltimore, where police have just responded to a shooting, Mabry spies a woman walking up the street yelling for someone.

"You see this crap and you just want to go out there and smack someone in the damn face and say, 'Why don't you get it together,'" she said. "If you've got a chance to change your life, then why don't you before you're not even here."

In the five years since becoming a Realtor, Mabry has weaved herself through the city's diverse community action coalitions, aiming to take on the woes of Rosemont, Walbrook and Mount Holly neighborhoods. She has shown houses for a local developer whose unoccupied, rehabbed homes in West Baltimore have to be boarded up to deter illegal salvaging raids.

On weeknights she gives home-buying seminars with Tri-Churches Housing, a community group on Scott Street in Southwest Baltimore that helps low-income people buy homes.

She does the same thing with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a similar organization that offers low interest rates and low down payments. Once, she got a client's medical bill forgiven in exchange for holding house-buying seminars for the hospital staff.

It's during those classes that Mabry's blunt delivery shines.

On a recent night, pacing before a dozen people on the second floor of St. Jerome's Hall on Hamburg Street, she fired off adages, warning people at a Tri-Churches seminar that they have to be careful even with their Realtors.

"Just because you qualify, don't go out and buy it, because you'll be eating tuna fish for the rest of your life," she said.

"You don't find Realtors who really care about the low-and moderate-income people," said Kelley Collings, community resource coordinator for Tri-Churches Housing. "Most Realtors disregard an entire chunk of a population, who aren't rich."

Canvassing this often ignored urban territory does have its payoff - she has no shortage of customers.

"Do you know this is gold," Mabry said, holding up a stack of people contacts. "People will pay me for this. People are like, 'Where did you get all these people?'"

The root of Mabry's success isn't all divine. She also gets some help from Deborah McIver, assistant vice president and Bel Air branch manager of Columbia National Mortgage Corp.

For many of Mabry's cases, it's McIver who gets the load through.

"She happens to be probably more committed than most," McIver said.

The search begins

Like many of Mabry's clients, Reives hardly has money to put down, and she doesn't have cash for renovations of the slightest kind. She and her mother have been able to scrape up $3,500. That means she needs to find a problem-free home, but must look in a price range that at best offers fixer-uppers.

Reives started off this March day rejecting one house because it was across the street from what appeared to be a thriving drug corner. But the house on Federal Street - now that had possibilities. There was plenty of room for her mother and two children. The place looked almost ready to move in. Then Mabry found mouse traps and found that the house was heated by oil, an energy source she dislikes.

The day's housing selection only worsened, and hours later Mabry was driving Denise back to the projects.

"You get frustrated," Reives said before sinking into silence, but Mabry gets her laughing as she talks about all the bad houses they've seen from winter, slushing through the snow, to the summer, eating snowballs together.

Then, while watching Reives make her way to her home, Mabry has another glance at the prison wall. Later on the phone, Reives tells her how someone started dealing out of a corner house near her.

Mabry said, "I'm getting you out of there."

A success story

A year ago Vanessa Curry was in Reives' position. She was living in Latrobe Homes. With two girls approaching their teen-age years, and with crime an everyday danger, she was looking for a way out.

She had just gotten a raise at her $9,000-a-year job as a cook at a day-care center, but that meant she would have to pay more money for her public housing, a two-bedroom apartment. After being rejected by some real estate agents because of her low income, Curry was looking to rent. Then she met Irene Mabry.

"When I ran across Irene, she said, 'it doesn't make a difference in what you make,'" Curry said. "'It's a matter of if they are willing to work with you.'"

For the next six months, Curry and Mabry scoured the city for a home that Curry could afford. Then she went to a house on Bond Street owned by an elderly woman.

"When I saw the hallway I said, 'Oh my goodness, we got a hallway,'" Curry recalled. "That's what I liked about it the most. I just stood in the hallway and started calling my children."

Curry eventually bought the house for $26,500 and qualified for an FHA loan at 7.5 percent. And, by working with the seller, she was even able to get some money back at settlement.

"Most Realtors really want it handed to them pretty easy," said Paul Bryant of Baldwin Development Corp., who has rehabilitated about 100 units in the Sandtown-Winchester, Harlem Park and Upton neighborhoods and now uses Mabry to find buyers. "If people don't qualify at first glance, then they go on to the next buyer. Irene doesn't do that. She gets involved in counseling."

Bryant had turned over his housing sales on Freemont and Arlington avenues to another Realtor. But, as he put it, "they were just sitting in the office waiting for the phone to ring."

On most nice weekends, Mabry can be found outside at one of the neighborhood markets, handing out fliers letting people know that if they can pay rent, they could be paying a mortgage on a house. At Lafayette Market on a spring day, Mabry has been displaced from her turf by two fire-and-brimstone street preachers. Mabry took up position in front of the market doors.

Such street-corner marketing is an essential in her business, Mabry said. And she does get results, many times from children who do give the fliers to their mothers, who call her. Most times, Mabry finds that they have credit problems and advises them that they need to take care of their bills first. For Mabry, just getting a response is important, however.

The making of Mabry

Mabry's compassion doesn't just come from her religious convictions. She has fond memories of her days growing up in the Norfolk projects. There were family reunions and people took care of each other. She recalled her grandmother, a welfare-rights advocate who would speak up for people caught in bureaucratic snags. Her grandmother promoted voter registration drives and participated in a sit-in at a Woolworth's in Memphis, Tenn.

As she grew up, she married, but the marriage deteriorated. She left her husband and had to live in a Washington shelter for the homeless. Eventually she divorced, but remarried in 1987 and moved to Baltimore.

When the Baltimore company for which she worked as an assistant office manager relocated to Philadelphia in 1993, she found herself unemployed. On a suggestion from a friend, Mabry got her real estate license.

In her first year, she was the top-selling agent among 26 at ERA Equity in Carney. She subsequently became a lifetime member in the million-dollar sellers' club.

Mabry can pinpoint her real estate revelation to her second day on the job. ACORN had called her office to see if anyone wanted to get involved in a house-buying education program. Mabry was new in a career with no leads and figured why not. After she saw how people were plunging into the house-buying process with no idea of how to protect themselves, she felt compelled to help.

"Truly it's a nightmare, especially if you got issues," she said.

Reives finds a home

On May 9, Denise Reives and her mother, Lois, arrived at what they hoped would soon be their house.

A week earlier, Reives' offer of $55,000 for the house on Shamrock Drive was accepted.

Now came the hard part - waiting to see if the deal goes through. It was time for the home inspection.

Reives wasn't going to let herself fall victim to any premature celebration. As she put it, "I believe it's not mine until you got the keys in my hand."

She followed the home inspector as he pointed out missing ceiling tiles, the low-hanging lighting fixture in the basement den, the chicken gumbo soup can hanging from a pipe to catch leaks and the misfiring sump pump.

Three hours later, he gave his report saying the repairs were not major. Mabry and the seller's agent fell into negotiatiions.

As they talked, Reives leaned back against the living room wall. It was then that she got the feeling that so many Realtors refer to as the moment when buyers realize that they are standing in their new home.

"I feel good," she said, her voice soft with caution, "because it's mine. As long they can fix it up, I feel glad. I feel real glad."

The settlement

Silently, Mabry and the Reives family wait at the settlement table at Mabry's Reisterstown Road office June 29. Finally, Alice Karangelen of Lawyers Advantage Title Group Inc. comes whirling through the door, clutching the title papers and a box of housewarming candies if the deal goes through.

But the settlement took a nose-dive from the beginning.

The price of the house was wrong. The settlement sheet had it at $55,500. Mabry and Reives thought that the price was $55,000. A game of high-tech phone tag ensued with the mortgage company. Cellular, cordless and fax machine phones were all used to find the loan officers at Norwest Mortgage. But the crisis was resolved and the $55,000 price stood.

Then came the real threat.

There was a discrepancy in the final settlement costs.

Reives and Mabry thought they needed $1,600 - the last of Reives' savings - to complete the transaction.

But Norwest Mortgage was demanding $3,400. Mabry was pleading that her numbers were correct. Meanwhile, across the table, Karangelen was trying to prepare Reives for the inevitable. "They're [the bank] not ready to settle," Karangelen said.

But Mabry knew it was now or never.

Even if Mabry knew she was right, the case would surely go back to the lender's underwriters where it could languish for months. And, complicating matters, Reives had already given notice that she was moving out of her apartment at Latrobe Homes on the 30th.

"This is a nightmare," Mabry said.

Mabry went to the front parlor and called Reives in.

"I don't see how you're going to get that total," Mabry said, then said, "I'm going to have to pay for the balance. There's no other way."

Reives looked at Mabry in disbelief.

"I can't make you do that," Reives said.

"I know Denise, but we came too far. Now you're going to have to tell me what you're going to do. You're going to have to tell me if you want this house," Mabry responded.

There was barely a nod from Denise, but Mabry knew what to do.

In the end, the seller and his Realtor pitched in a total of $275 and Mabry $800, that came in addition to the $500 bonus she previously waived in order to keep the deal going forward.

There were hugs and well-wishes, a long hug between Mabry and Denise.

"They showed me that they really gave a damn," Mabry said.

Besides, this case fits in with the operating plan that has kept Mabry in the business. She turned away from the crazy Reisterstown Road traffic.

"I took a loss," Mabry said, "but who's to say that God won't send me five more customers."

THE REALTY WISDOM OF IRENE MABRY

"I learned you can have it all and you can lose it all, and I found myself in the same situation that a lot of people go through."

"I really believe in my heart that God places me in these situations with these people, because it's always the worst cases. I But the complicated ones are more exciting to me because you're doing something to help somebody."

"Just because you qualify, don't go out and buy it, because you'll be eating tuna fish for the rest of your life."

Pub Date: 7/12/98