CMA awards: Get your ballots in

The Canadian Mortgage Awards are back with a focus on charity and ready to honour this year’s leading industry players. We’re also tipping our hats to the hundreds of others who have claimed trophies over the last eight years, with a retrospective on their continuing contributions to the broker channel.

The Canadian Mortgage Awards are back with a focus on charity and ready to honour this year’s leading industry players. We’re also tipping our hats to the hundreds of others who have claimed trophies over the last eight years, with a retrospective on their continuing contributions to the broker channel.

Online nominations open Monday, Oct. 14, 2013, giving nominees even more time to campaign before the event kicks off May 9 at the Liberty Grand in Toronto. PwC will once again act as the awards auditor.

Now here’s more of what’s new this year: CMP has put together a how-to video on nominations to guide you through the process and ensure finalists are once again drawn from across Canada’s broker channel. That aid, along with much more on the event’s future and history are the CMA website. Click here to access the video.

And once again, organizers are publishing the judging criteria for each award on the same web portal, inviting you to review that list before making your nominations. But above and beyond the nominations themselves, CMP is also identifying leading brokers in all award categories as deserving of a nomination and consideration by the judges – a collection of experts drawn from within and outside the industry. You can find the Criteria for every award category here.

The idea is to cast as wide and inclusive a net as possible, say organizers ensuring the best nd the brightest are put before the judges. Winning a CMA continues to be the highest accolade for mortgage and finance professionals in Canada. And past winners agree.

“I’m ecstatic. I feel blessed just to be in the same company of those who were nominated. I’ve been flying at 300 feet ever since I got the news,” says Greg Nowik , with Mortgage Architects - Universal Mortgage Architects and recipient of the 2013 Mortgage Broker of the Year (Fewer Than 25 Employees) award.

“I was completely shocked to win,” says another winner, Alyson Thiessen, with Get Er Done Girls - Mortgage Intelligence. Her Red Deer, Alta., team took home the Mortgage Brokerage of the Year (Fewer Than 25 Employees) award this year.

“We went to Toronto happy to be nominated and when they called our name, I was stunned,” she recounts. “What an honour to be recognized. We’re a little team from a little town in Alberta – but we have a huge heart!” 

And once again, the awards will cap off the Mortgage Summit -- CMP’s professional development conference, set for May 8 and all about learning, innovating and networking.

That activity comes just before the awards, which for the first time have partnered with Muscular Dystrophy Canada to put together a charity auction, featuring big ticket items and focused on demonstrating the industry’s commitment to community.

Presented by CMP and MortgageBrokerNews.ca, the industry’s biggest and most comprehensive celebration of excellence has grown exponentially since its inception in 2005. And the upcoming awards are primed to continue the tradition.

Click here for more on this seminal event.