Australia’s most elite brokers came together at the High-Performance Business Summit in Sydney yesterday (3 May) and went over the finer points of building a truly successful brokerage.
The event was presented by
Australian Broker’s sister publication
Mortgage Professional Australia (MPA) and featured speakers and panel discussions on a range of topics, including lead generation, referral partners, diversification and digital marketing. Over 170 brokers from around the country attended.
The brokers chosen to be part of the panel discussions were among the nominees for MPA’s Top 100 Brokers and 10 Top Independent Brokerages of 2016.
In the first panel of the day, Paul Wright, director of
Choice Home Loans Wollongong, talked about his experience with referral partners, saying that real estate agents were some of the most difficult to work with.
“A lot of their leads aren’t fantastic. Part of that is education. I’ve found the best real estate agents to work with are the ones you’ve already written business for. That’s pretty much what I focus on to generate business from those guys. If they know how you operate, it’s obviously very easy for them to say to a client ‘This is the broker I personally use’.”
This is a great way to build referral partners in general, Wright said, with anyone from accountants to solicitors suitable for bringing in new clients.
When asked about corporate branding, Lloyd Thomas, director of business & product development at Direct Property Network, talked about the creative solutions his firm used to reach clients.
“We’ve built a new platform for the literature that our customers receive,” he said. “We have a brand book we put together that won an award last year. We put a lot of time and effort into that and it’s something customers receive at the presentation we put together for them.”
This coffee table book won the silver medal in the Sydney Design Awards and is a “journey book” for customers just getting involved with the Direct Property Network.
In a later discussion on business strategies from the country’s top brokers, panellists were asked about the numbers and metrics they used to measure success.
Deanna Ezzy, finance strategist at
Trilogy Funding, said that while loan volumes were great for making comparisons with other brokers nationwide, there were other, more important measures.
“We used to focus a lot on lodgements. But then we started realising there was a whole lot in between and we were focusing too much on that rather than the process and the customer.”
“We started focusing on just giving good service and making sure that timeframes didn’t blow out. We focused more on the customer and where they were at in their journey rather than trying to push them into a lodgement.”
Speaking about evolving as a broker, Ruan Burger, managing director at Time Home Loans, said it was important to give clients value to help them understand the need for trail commission.
“You are going to have to start showing value for why you are earning trail. I’ve always said that trail is a payment for maintenance. It is there so we can truly look after our clients. If you haven’t been doing that, all things being equal, you shouldn’t be getting the trail in the first place.”
The next High-Performance Business Summit will be held in Melbourne on 24 May.
Click here to view the program and register.
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