Which way to the beach?

_{By | 27/10/2009 7:00:00 PM | 0 comments}

After moving to Canada "to see what moose looked like," Australian ex-pat and CMP Top 50 broker Beverley Brandl has made Ontario's northern beach getaway her permanent gome  - but it's no Gold Coast.

Located at the southern edge of Georgian Bay and approximately two hours north of Toronto, the town of Wasaga Beach has a population of around 17,000 full-time residents – a number that doubles during the summer months as cottagers descend on the otherwise sleepy town and take advantage of the 14 km stretch of white sand beach.

Since the first half of the 20th century Wasaga has made a name for itself as a place for fun in the sun, and today it’s unofficially the place for Ontario urbanites to escape to every summer weekend – and they show up in droves (some put the number of summer tourists at around two million).

Wasaga is almost as famous now for its beach as it is for its main strip of arcades, restaurants and bars, with traffic permanently ground to a halt every Saturday and Sunday (not unlike weekday gridlock in downtown Toronto, where a lot of the seasonal visitors come from).

When you do drive in to Wasaga, one of the first things you notice is the abundance of billboards for mini-putt courses, hotels, campsites and cottages for rent, but amidst them, standing at 15-feet, is also a sign for Beverly Brandl’s Dominion Lending Centres Integrity Plus, who has been carving out a comfortable network of referrals for her two-year-old brokerage.

“It took until last year to get really busy,” she says over the phone in her Australian accent. “I’ve been very aggressive in the last year and finally put signs up.”

But it’s not like she needs them, as this 27-year veteran of the financial business landed herself at number 25 on this year’s CMP Top 50 list.

From the Gold coast to Georgian Bay
After working at Avco Financial in Australia for 16 years, where Brandl and her husband, a commercial pilot, had a waterfront property on the Gold Coast, they decided to uproot, setting their sights on Canada. Without ever having been here before, they ended up in Swan River, Man. Because they “wanted to see what moose looked like. My god that was nasty,” she laughs.

After two years in Swan River, followed by a stint in Thunder Bay, she ended up in Wasaga “by accident.” They saw the potential of the nearby Barrie market – once noted as the fastest growing city in Ontario – but they simply couldn’t find a property there, so the beach was the next best thing. And besides, maybe the beach culture and white sand of Wasaga would remind her of back home?

At this thought Brandl lets out another good-hearted laugh.

“Wasaga is nothing like Australia – with its rolling waves and salt water. When we first saw the sign for the beach here we sort of had to laugh. Here was this dirty little stretch of water that is completely flat.”

That said, it didn’t prevent her from settlingdown and staying put for the last four years. She even owns a waterfront cottage just outside of town – approximately three minutes from her home.

“It’s just this little yellow thing,” she says. “The goal is to actually knock it down and build someday.”

It’s from this little cottage that she is able to enjoy a lot of thing she loves in her non-existent free time, whether that’s wakeboarding or waterskiing (two things that the flat water is actually good for) and fishing.

As for brokering, with 27 years of experience in the industry, and as a broker for the last five, she finally decided that she had built-up a big enough referral network to sign up with DLC, one of the greatest risks she ever took, simply because of the commissioned income, she says.

But she’s fared well for herself, and credits it to her time spent at Citi Financial (and Avco before that).

“It just made me not afraid to ask,” she says. “You don’t take rejections to heart.”

With her husband doing the admin work (“It’s my one weaknesses,” she says), Brandl has built her team of one to include two assistants, one underwriter and even some “stand-alone” brokers who work for her company but file their
own mortgages.

And oddly enough, from her office in Wasaga she has been able to build up a strong business from all over Ontario and the rest of the country.

“This month I may do 30 deals, but only two of them will be in Wasaga,” she says, adding that she
often deals with clients in B.C. and even Quebec, despite the language barrier.

“The biggest issue was in Quebec, just because of the language, but for the most part they are all fairly straight-forward. The one thing is that on the odd deal the lender may insist that I co-broker it with a broker from that province.
That’s just when I’m working with regional lenders though, and for the most part I do them entirely myself.”

Brandl says this is just one of the side-effects when you believe, as she does, that “you cannot possibly suit all the needs of your clients working with only one lender. I believe very strongly in having access to many lenders and products.”

It’s that attitude that saw her fund more than $50 million last year – not bad for a town of 17,000.

Efficient and aggressive
Despite funding only a few local deals a month, Brandl markets Wasaga hard, with a monthly radio show on 97.7, the Beach, which she acquired after paying for some advertising on it.

“I guess they liked what I had to say so now once a month I do a show,” she says. Other than that, most of the business she acquires is just from being “very aggressive – I chase, I get back to people,” she says. And if she’s even remotely as fast as she was getting back to CMP for this article, then it’s no doubt that any potential client would be impressed. In fact, she was once able to meet a client and close with him in just eight days.

“I had a referral from a local Realtor who had a client that bet his friend a case of beer he could close within eight days,” she says. “The Realtor who referred him to me already had a place in mind, which he ended up liking, and I was able to close the deal in eight days. His friend brought him the beer, and I’ve done three deals since with him.”

One of the approaches she takes to ensure that her deals always close is to send a questionnaire to her clients to help pinpoint what lender to go with. It helps her identify her clients’ wants, even if it’s just a preference to work with a name brand.

Not only has this approach helped her maintain a funding ratio of around 90 to 95 per cent, she says, but it allowed her to surpass the goal of growing the business by 20 per cent. “Last year we doubled that number,” she says. “We may even look at opening another location, perhaps in Barrie or Collingwood at some point.”

This would help her realize her other goal of being able to “eventually manage the business more than working in it the seven days a week,” she says.

Not only that, but it would allow her to enjoy the Canadian weather that much more.

“You know, I thought it was really cute for the first few months, but then you get over that. I’ve gotten used to it though, and gone from wearing thermal underwear in the winter to just normal jackets.”