As a Mortgage Broker my over-riding incentive is to give my clients the best deal I can. I know, as you do, that our clients have a huge range of options when it comes to home loans and are bombarded with advertising. My personal economic motivation is to give them the best loan I can to give me the best chance of:-

  1. winning their business in the first place,
  2. minimise the risk of them refinancing out and my incurring a clawback
  3. maximising my chance of getting their future business
  4. maximising my chance of them referring their friends to me.

Irrespective of any ethical standpoint, those financial incentives are simply far greater than chasing the highest commission, to the extent that a higher commission is even correlated with a more expensive loan.

Initially I worked from home as an individual Mortgage Broker, knocking on real estate agent and accountant’s doors and doing what I could to network my way to new clients. A big advantage I had was my website and the occasional leads that would come from it and I won a Rising Star sales award from my Aggregator at the time.

I educated myself around online advertising and promoting my website and this proved effective for a few years. It allowed me to form partnerships with other Brokers around the country where I would generate leads for them through my website. It also allowed me to spend almost all of my working time on lead generation and away from the operational side of writing loans.

I was successful enough that I became the Australian Finance Group (AFG’s) single largest broking company and remained at that level for a few years.

At the time I thought I had a sustainable, long term marketing system, but I was quite wrong.

I now know that effective marketing that stands the test of time needs three things working together — Message, Media and Market. I will discuss these more later in this book.