Specialise your marketing
“Don’t try to make a product for everybody, because that is a product for nobody.” – Seth Godin
If you don’t want to really specialise, or you just aren’t ready yet, then you must at the very least specialise your marketing. As I’ve discussed above, people will always prefer someone who has experience handling situations as similar to theirs as possible. Rightly or wrongly, people assume that their borrowing circumstances are unique and they want to stack the odds in their favour by dealing with someone who is used to solving their specific problems.
When one of my daughters was two years old she needed a particular eye operation. My wife and I found the one doctor in Australia who solely performed that one operation on children. He was on the other side of the country, but there was no thought of doing anything other than going to him.
When something is that important, you want THE specialist.
You may well feel that the process for helping a first home buyer is not markedly different than someone who is upgrading to their next home, but I can guarantee that both borrowers would choose someone who specialises in loans for their situation over a general Mortgage Broker.
For this reason, you need to segment your market.