Online real estate brokerage launches mortgage arm

A successful online real estate brokerage recently launched its mortgage arm with the hopes of earning and keeping business throughout the buying process and it will look to an established brokerage to provide back-end support.

A successful online real estate brokerage recently launched its mortgage arm with the hopes of earning and keeping business throughout the buying process and it will look to an established brokerage to provide back-end support.

“TheRedPin positions itself as a technology company that happens to sell real estate and most of the business we do is online; the agents are salaried and the mortgage department is very similar to that,” Mark Olkowski, principle broker for TheRedPin Mortgage Brokerage Inc. told MortgageBrokerNews.ca. “Now RedPin’s Realtors don’t have to source their own business – we supply it to them.”

Currently, TheRedPin focuses on real estate in the GTA and surrounding areas; with sprinklings of listings as far as Guelph, Oshawa and Barrie. The plan is to take over Ontario before spreading as far as British Columbia, according to Olkowski.

And the formula for success relies almost entirely on Internet leads.

“95 per cent of the business comes from online. The platform they have is if you are looking for a property in the GTA the Red Pin actually has more information than anybody else and that includes MLS,” Olkowski said. They basically take all this information and bring it all onto one site and that includes construction deals as well.”

TheRedPin teamed up with RMAI who will provide the back-end support for its mortgage brokers.

“I’ve worked for several brokers before … and RMAI just really had what we needed,” Olkowski said. “We wanted to maintain the brand and we needed that back-end support for payroll and deals and everything else so it suited us for what we needed to make it work.
“We’re really happy with Ron (De Silva).”