People ask the question all the time:
“Why should I use you? Why not just go to my bank?”
There are a lot of reasons. Watch this video blog for my explanation.
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Transcription of the Video Blog:
Hey everybody, Rowan Smith from the Mortgage Centre.
I got several comments back on some of my videos I posted recently, and one of them was an email to me personally that said, “why should I use you? What makes you different than my bank?” especially given that one of the rates I was quoting, and one of the products I was talking about, was issued by his own bank. So, I wanted to put together a post on why you should use a mortgage broker.
There is a service component. That is first and foremost. The most important thing. We are available, or at least, I am available, seven days a week, from 9am to 9pm. I make myself available later than that if clients require it.
Now the reason being is, it’s not just that I’m a workaholic, although, many would say that. It’s also because people are writing offers in the evening. You work during the day, and your bank is open during the day, but you start writing an offer oftentimes 9, 10, 11 o’clock at night. You are going to need assistance from somebody at those hours to say “yes you can qualify for that,” or “yes, we can stretch to $700,000” or perhaps, “yes, we can use the basement suite income,” or “no, we cannot in that city can’t” for whatever reason. There are a multitude of reasons and a multitude of rules that apply to financing.
You banker won’t be available during those hours. We are.
Now, we offer the same product. I always liken us to a Saturn dealership. You come to us, we offer you one price. It doesn’t matter how much money you’ve got, or how much money you earn, you are going to get the lowest rate from us that we can possibly give you because we are under a fiduciary duty, which is to protect your financial best interests. So, the products you are going to get from us, and the rates, are going to be the lowest that we can possibly get.
Now, if I give you a TD mortgage, why wouldn’t you just have gone with TD, as an example? Well we as brokers harness and band together. We harness the power of the many of us within our office, and there are about 15 of us in our office right now. We do hundreds of millions of dollars worth of mortgages a year. So, we come to the table Toronto Dominion, and, you know, Vancity, and all these other institutions; we come to the table with a lot more clout than one client does. Though they have a $500,000 mortgage, which, to an individual is a massive amount of money; to an institution on Toronto Dominion’s scale it’s not as big. Now if we approach them and try to get that rate negotiated down, well we get volume discounts just as if you bought one thousand widgets instead of one, and you’re going to get a better deal on all of them. It’s the same with us. It’s a discount game. It’s a volume game.
So you’ve got:
- Service
- Rate
- Third party knowledge and unbiased advice
As a broker, and I want to clarify the difference between a “broker” and the guy that is sitting in your TD bank, or RBC bank, or is a mobile mortgage specialist that we see all the time. They are not mortgage brokers. They are individuals that work for the organization and they sell TD or RBC product FIRST, and if they can’t get it done they usually have contacts who are guys like myself who work with all the other banks and arrange the financing as best they can.
When you are sitting in front of a mobile mortgage specialist that represents one organization, you are NOT dealing with a broker who is offering you that service level, that rate negotiation power, and that unbiased third party advice.
We [brokers] get paid (roughly) the same at every institution. There are some that pay more, and there are some that pay less and we, as brokers, are paid more for longer terms than we are for shorter terms. But, by and large, we are going to be doing what is in your best interests or you won’t use us! So we create that value through service, expertise, and being available whenever you need our help.
So if you are in that situation: you are unhappy with slow, lazy turnaround from your bankers, or you’re upset with the fact that they’re going home at 4:30pm and the don’t even pick their phone up at 4:29pm give me a call and it will be a world of change for you.
It’s Rowan Smith at the Mortgage Centre.
