Beating the banks is worth the fight: Brokers

Tightened lending regulations have made it tougher to fund deals but brokers are best served to put their noses to grindstone and work harder to find the right mortgage for their clients, according to two players.

Tightened lending regulations have made it tougher to fund deals but brokers are best served to put their noses to grindstone and work harder to find the right mortgage for their clients, according to two players.

“We have to battle for our share of A-business; we need to become more efficient, more productive, more nimble and creative, learn to live with what is likely permanently lower revenue per deal,”  Ron Butler of Verico Butler Mortgage said in the comments section of MortgageBrokerNews.ca. “It's no fun but too many great people have worked too hard for too many years to abandon the A mortgage space to competitors now.”

Butler’s comments come on the heels of increased competition among the big banks for A-deals, with several of them aggressively targeting customers with sub-three per cent five-year fixed rates. It has some brokers wondering how to compete.

“We’re seeing more and more brokers exiting the A-market; I’m seeing more private (lenders) out there, more B-lenders and the banks are killing us in the A-space,” Joe Walsh of Dominion Lending Centres Bedrock Financial Group Inc. told MortgageBrokerNews.ca Wednesday. “Banks have begun focusing more on their retail lending and if they wanted to they could blow us out of the water.”

“They can undercut us and that’s a reality.”

But getting creative and taking on an advisory role will set brokers apart from their banking counterparts, according to one industry player.

“Brokers spend a lot of time lamenting how difficult it is to get a mortgage, and how much harder they have to work to get a deal done now compared to before,” commenter, M. Robertson said. “But isn’t that the whole point of a mortgage broker? To do the work so the client doesn’t have to?”