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A fast-growing single-broker, investor-focused brokerage in Adelaide has topped off a huge 2024 with the team settling 14 loans worth a total of $10 million on a single day in December.
Brokerage & Co, founded by Sergio Stefano eight months ago after he left his former aggregator, does 50 to 60 applications a month, primarily for investors who often have multiple properties.
Stefano told Australian Broker the firm’s “pure good fortune” to settle 14 loans on Dec. 13 came from the strong pipeline the business had built, which added up to a big day last week.
“We’ve been very fortunate operating here under our new brand in Adelaide here for about eight months now that our team is writing about $30 million a month, which is quite good,” he said.
“We have got a bit of a niche in the market, in that investment space, so a lot of people are coming to us to utilise our services, which is good to see.”
Stefano said the day was a “mammoth effort”, when taking into account coordinating conveyancers, dealing with bank discharge teams and ensuring all the loan payout figures were correct.
“It was a very big day. I think we started at 6am in the morning, and we finished quite late as well, just making sure everything came out right, but the entire day was really just coordination.”
Stefano, who has two onshore PAs and one offshore assistant, said ensuring his team can act autonomously on tasks they like and are good at was critical to processing such a high volume.
“Everyone has their own specific tasks, their own job to do, and everyone’s very good at that job.”
Connected via a CRM, which the team uses to plan their days, the team knows which settlements will occur first and what needs to be handled before they are able to move on to the next task.
In that way, he said a high-volume day process was just “putting one foot in front of the other”.
Stefano said he is also a big believer in team members devoting 100% capacity to the task in front of them at that point in time, rather than splitting effort and attention across multiple tasks.
“We can’t obviously do 50% over here, 50% over there, because you only get half the task done,” he said. “So we just concentrate all of our focus on each task as we go.”
“And that’s pretty much the way it happened [on Dec. 13]. It was just sort of methodical; slow and steady, but smooth and fast,” he said.
Brokerage & Co’s team also needed to be completely in sync to process the volume, Stefano said.
“In one case, I think the client had a $3,000 shortfall, so we had to make sure that the client could get to the bank to disperse the money straight away, because the interest that was calculated was a little bit high,” Stefano explained. “So little things like that we have got to prepare for, because if you’re not all in sync you can see how that can all fall apart quite quickly,” he said.
Stefano said that 14 was the highest number of loans the business had settled in a day, and he hopes that for the business, $10 million days will not be completely out of the ordinary in the future.
However, he said that for him, good days are the nine days out of 10 when his team is just working an eight-hour day, because they are following “a very smooth process” in processing loan volumes.
“I don’t want my team members going home too late and starting too early. I want to be in a position where everyone can still work an eight-hour day for the most part; that to me is brilliant, because then obviously what we’re doing in our processes and everything else is working.”
Servicing clients once they have settled is also critical, Stefano said, even while bringing in new loans.
“Even though we can keep a high volume rate, we have exceptional client service, and that's extremely important to us. There's no good being a volume writer if 25% of your loans discharge.”
While Stefano puts the $10 million day down to good fortune, he advised brokers that building a pipeline to make those conditions possible comes down to “being strict with what you want”.
“If you’re wanting to generate 10 leads a week, that might mean sending 100 emails to different referral partners or potential referral partners that share the same interest, right?” Stefano said.
“You have to just be relentless with the follow-up, and you have to be relentless with what you want, and you can't make any concessions for it,” he said.
