Brokers, prepare to eat your words?

Doubting Thomases may well have to eat their words, with a number of Invis/Mortgage Intelligence brokers having already won deals through the company's new relationship with a rate site.

Doubting Thomases may well have to eat their words, with a  number of Invis/Mortgage Intelligence brokers having already won deals through the company's new relationship with a rate site.

"Initially, I may have been a sceptical that the site would yield deals," said Michael Celuch, an MI broker in Windsor, "but, yes, I have already received B-deals from the Kanetix site, so it is working."

His experience reflects those of at least two other Invis/MI mortgage professionals, randomly selected by MortgageBrokerNews.ca and contacted over the last week. All are pointing to the kind of alternative lending deals CEO Bob Ord referenced in announcing the partnership with rate site Kanetix late last year.

Under the terms of the partnership, the site pre-approves rate shoppers, who are then contacted by a Invis/Mortgage Intelligence call centre for followup. More-complex deals are referred to Invis or MI brokers.

Ord attracted criticism from some industry vets last year for suggesting the Invis/MI call centre would expect to close only 5 per cent to 10 per cent of online queries, with the rest channelled through to brokers. Some observers thought the projection was simply out of whack and that the call centre would retain a larger share of those leads.

Anecdotally, the Kanetix deal is bringing some business through the door for brokers within the Invis/MI family, the expectation being it could eventually provide more.

For now, said Celuch, "it's something."