Here's one way to boost team morale

If a CMA award can lift the profile of even the highest flying brokerage, it may have even more of an effect on its morale, says one of last year’s buoyant winners

If a CMA award can lift the profile of even the highest flying brokerage, it may have even more of an effect on its morale, says one of last year’s buoyant winners.

“I was a little bit surprised in that sense,” says Daryn Young, broker/owner of Mortgage Intelligence TMF: The Mortgage Firm. “Winning the Brokerage of the Year (fewer than 25 employees) did help to lift team spirit and reinforce the idea that we as a team were really doing a good job. I was surprised.”

While winners of the Canadian Mortgage Awards frequently point to the marketing boost that comes part and parcel with that victory, there are increasingly other, equally valuable spinoffs.

Those benefits aren’t lost on the growing number of industry professionals, from individual brokers of all stripes to the underwriters and BDMs they rely on. As a group they’ve threatening to outstrip last year’s nomination numbers as that process this 2013 presses on to a Feb. 15 closing. The CMA awards gala is set for Toronto on May 10.

It means that industry players have less than a month to nominate themselves or a colleague for 20 awards, all honouring excellence in the broker channel.

This year mark the return of PwC as the awards auditor as well as the introduction of a new and easier to navigate nominations process.

Still, brokers from all over the country may be more interested in the end result of the voting, which draws winners from across Canada.

 “People are starting to get recognized in between Toronto and Vancouver,” says Young, himself based in Regina, Sask. “It’s changed.”