Remember back a couple of posts when I mentioned that I was going to switch hosting providers… did anyone notice? I think the site was down for a maximum 4 hours (thanks mostly to my domain provider having a bad hair day, no updates allowed, no explanation why, just we’ll complete the request for you shortly). Couple of emails back and forth with support to get this blog back in order and voila. Having done 3 such moves (which I whole heartedly do not recommend to anyone to do if you have any complexity to your site) and this had to have been the smoothest of them all.

I bet you’ve all been wondering what I’ve been up to? Me too! I can’t pin it down to any one thing, but by golly many things have been chewing up my personal bandwidth. Let’s start with my corporate parent company, Mortgage Alliance. I keep coming to these small realizations about this national company I work for. First off, when I started my career I was told that if I was to start in mortgage brokering that I shouldn’t start with a big national company. Why? Well the chances of success were much less as I would start working for an active broker and be tied to that broker learning from him/her and all their mistakes. Working for a national broker also meant I would never get any training from the company. It would always seem like head office was a major tax on top of the broker I’m working for taking most of any of the deals I am bringing in. And so on and so forth. It’s this. It’s that. I knew a guy who once…

I’ve spoken with a few that have worked with one of the other national companies and even the “independent” that I worked for joined the Verico group of companies. The only advantage to Verico being all the independents that join are now seen as an aggregate and thus volume numbers are significant and this translates to volume bonus and allows them to compete on the same level as the national guys. For the guy starting at the bottom, this means nothing as their handful of deals adds to the pot but they seen no extra compensation. No training. No support. No extras for being part of Verico beyond the aggregation (show me the money).

One of the biggest things I’ve notice in this industry is the complete lack of loyalty to anyone company, whether it is agents to a mortgage broker, or underwriters/development managers to their lending institution. I can only think of one development manager who is still with the same lender in the last 4 years. When you meet one that you haven’t seen in a while, you first ask who are you with now? It’s like a revolving door. I look at the leadership at Mortgage Alliance. There’s a group of 8-10 of them that started the whole thing about 12 years ago. They’re all still there… ALL OF THEM… To me that says something about the core of the company. People don’t stay with a sinking ship. I’m sure in the first few years they had a grand vision of being a national lender, but that’s pretty hard to do with just 8-10 people. They stuck with it. Persistence pays as the saying goes. Little by little they grew. Last check, they were at 1800 strong. Still the same 8-10 people at the helm. The vision, I’m sure by now, is a little more tangible. No major corporate mergers along the way. Training. Yep, they seem to have this one on track as well. The vision (and implementation) was so strong that CMHC even caught on to what they were doing. CMHC announced their first training partnership with Mortgage Alliance. No other company comes close they said. We are now developing training programs in partnership with CMHC for use internally and externally for those taking the CMHC courses.

Advertising. Here’s one of those subtle things. They don’t advertise in any of the trade magazines. Our advertising is focused on you the consumer. To me this only makes sense. Why advertise in the trade magazines? Do industry trade magazines help your, our clients in anyway? Do they instead spend millions (over time) buying radio ads to try and be “top of mind”. (See my previous post about marketing) So that when you think mortgages, you automatically spit out our jingle (which I’m still trying to get my kids to do). I think it’s odd if you say you work for Mortgage Alliance, no recognition, but if you sing the jingle “Mooortgage Alliiiance”, people go “oh, yeah. I heard that on the radio. That’s you guys?”

Franchise Model – I think this is probably the major key to the success of this operation. Rather than trying to organize and coordinate 1800 individual brokers/agents, they simply work on offering the best options to franchise owners. They in turn then turn around and work out the best deals possible with their staff. For head office it’s much easier to direct 180 franchises than keep 1800 people happy. Leverage in business.

Lenders – some get it, some don’t. The banks and the mortgage lenders who have been lending following the banks model, don’t get it. They see us as another source of business. Next. For the “newer” lenders or more flexible lenders, we talk to them about partnerships and strategic alliances. They in turn then come back to us and propose new ideas. The result, both sides grow. The lenders that don’t get it. They treat us like a number. Change their compensation model at random because it suits them better and only tell us after we discover the commission was significantly lower than anticipated. Etc. etc.

One lender we deal with, when they entered the mortgage market in Canada a few years back, knew that in order to survive they had to bring something new to the table. Their big think was what they call a “white label” mortgage product. We advertise using our name brand, in this case the “Right Mortgage”, and they do the underwriting in the background. Any communication they make with the client has our logo and the agents name for the contact. Allow us to be “top of mind” in our customers mind.

They’ve even gone on step further with our company. We were doing so many deals with them, that not only did we have dedicated resources with them, but they decided it would be a better idea if they co-located their staff in our head office. Now that’s an alliance. They see how we work internally and adjust the way they do business to help our clients.

Quality and consistency – I don’t have the details on this but there was a national broker that approached us and asked if we wanted to add some 1200 brokers to our business. The brokerage was in some financial trouble for some reason. The decision was to turn this offer down as we preferred to grow on our own and cultivate the culture we’ve created. If individuals wanted to join us on their own they were welcomed to do so.

I’m sure I’ve bored most of you to tears at this point, but I’d just like to give you all the impression that I have no plans to move anywhere anytime soon. Of course transitioning would be detrimental to my income for at least 6 months and I really don’t want to do that EVER again. But I gotta say, this is a pretty forward looking group. I’m certainly impressed with how they run their business.