Andrew Mirams has been recognised as one of the leading brokers in the Australian mortgage industry by being listed in the 2018 edition of Mortgage Professional Australia's Top 100 Brokers
Intuitive Finance
Aggregator: Connective
Sandringham, Vic
Total value of residential loans FY2017/18: $154,264,802
Total number of residential loans FY2017/18: 338
Andrew Mirams may have dropped slightly from No. 4 last year to No. 7 this year, but he’s still the top bald broker on the list, he jokingly points out.
Last year he put that up on Facebook for a bit of a laugh and got two deals out of it. “It’s all about the marketing. Why be No. 7 when you can be No. 1?” he says.
“We can’t take ourselves too seriously. It shows a bit of personality and humour and engages people in a different way.”
But seriously, what makes Mirams proud is not where he ranks on the Top 100; it’s that he’s getting 100% of his deals approved in this challenging lending climate. There may be more scrutiny of the channel and loan volumes may be down, but brokers are still “getting stuff done”, he says.
“It doesn’t mean it’s not harder to get them through; it’s just I don’t give up very easy. I fight hard for my clients to get the right outcome,” Mirams says.
Achieving that sort of conversion rate comes from asking for a lot of information from clients up front. Mirams says he doesn’t submit a loan until he’s completely sure that he has all the information he needs to satisfy the lender.
He now has two brokers working with him, including his son. They each specialise in different niches, such as expats and home upgraders, self-employed and investors, and first home buyers. That way Intuitive Finance can be a generalised business with internal specialists.
This past year, Mirams has been working on getting the balance right, distributing work to his fellow brokers so he doesn’t have to write it all. That allowed him time to take a seven-week holiday in Europe and regular quarterly breaks.
There’s no doubt that in order to write the volumes that the Top 10 brokers do, they must work hard. But he says it’s not all about the numbers.
“I enjoy working hard, but there’s no point just working hard and not enjoying life; it just goes too quickly. We work to live, not live to work.”
Mirams is now in a transition phase and admits that “maybe in time I won’t feature in the Top 100, but hopefully I’ll have some other Intuitive Finance brokers up there”.