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The Melbourne Mortgage Company’s senior lending specialist Michael Maiolo said clients seeking SMSF and NDIS loans benefit from brokers with highly specialised experience in these niches.
Maiolo, aged 25, is a broker who specialises in SMSF and NDIS loans and has been focusing on these niches for the past three years, after joining the brokerage in 2019 while he was still at university.
Taking the Pepper Money Broker of the Year – Specialist Lending award at the 2024 Australian Mortgage Awards, Maiolo (pictured above) said he has seen firsthand the value specialism provided to his niche clients.
“I do think it does require a specialist. We're playing with people's retirement, we're trying to help clients to get a loan inside super, so it's quite important they go to the right person,” Maiolo said.
He said he had seen inexperienced lenders enter the “complex” SMSF space with offerings that did not compare well with the other products existing on the market.
This had ended up costing clients; one client recently came to the business after being placed by another broker into a lending product that had higher rates and allowed him to borrow less.
“That affected him from buying the next one,” Maiolo said. “If he had come to us from the start, that would have allowed him to buy two [properties] easily, and that's really because they didn't have all the knowledge of his assets and lending in that space.” .
“It’s really detrimental when you’re putting your super towards it. It’s quite unfortunate, and that’s why knowing certain things is quite important.”
The Melbourne Mortgage Company operates SMSF Loan Experts and NDIS Loan Experts as sub-brands to attract customers in these specialist niches to the business.
Maiolo said that, at present, his business consisted of about 60% SMSF lending and 40% NDIS lending, and that both these markets had proved resilient even in the higher interest rate environment.
“Those fields we play in have been quite busy during these times, purely because of the way interest rates are and no one's sort of buying standard properties. Clients are still looking at other ways to invest, so we've been basically the busiest we've ever been.”
But Maiolo said some lenders were better than others and specialist experience made a difference.
“Depending on the client situation, there's some [products] that are more premium that will help clients longer term, versus the ones that are pushed out there the most, but are ultimately not the best for the clients from a lending point of view, and can actually restrict them moving forward.”
Maiolo’s finance and accounting majors at university have helped him in his specialist lending career, including understanding the more complex financials of his typically sophisticated client base.
Learning on the job through processing and assisting brokers in the business, he came to understand what lenders are looking for, allowing him to filter out client situations that will not meet criteria.
“We don’t get any declines at all, unless clients have lied to us about their credit score; our clients are really happy, and we get strong reviews, which is all very helpful to us as well,” Maiolo said.
And despite some challenges with his younger age, given he usually provides SMSF and NDIS broking services to much older clients, Maiolo said he had no plans to change his specialist focus.
“We pride ourselves on helping clients with a solution.
“We've got a lot of clients that come to us, that may have tried another broker but were not able to succeed; because we have the knowledge, we have the experience, we have contacts in the space, that's sort of what makes us different to everyone else.”
