Four wins in a row for Australia’s no.1 independent brokerage

The Australian Lending & Investment Centre has been named Australia’s no.1 independent brokerage by MPA’s Top 10 Independent Brokerages Report. 

This is the fourth consecutive time ALIC have topped the report, which is ranked across a series of brokerage numbers including total settlements, loan book, annual volume per broker and conversion rate. The brokerage is home to Top 100 Brokers Mark Davis, Kevin Agent and Seuj Barua and Young Gun Natasha Choi.  

Managing director Jason Back told MPA what separates ALIC from the rest:

Investor lending changes

As a property investor-focused brokerage, ALIC is certainly not immune to changes in lending. “The mantra in our office at the moment, unfortunately, it that it’s 25% harder and 25% less fun!” says managing director Jason Back. Yet the brokerage did grow its annual settlement volume and Back’s view of 2016-2017 is broadly positive: “we’ve actually had a fantastic year of stability and that in itself is a change.”

ALIC’s proposition is by now well-known: positioning their brokers as the centre of a ring of expert referral partners to give clients a holistic service offering.  Their strategy, however, revolves around talent development and training up young gun brokers.
 

Now those young guns are becoming experienced brokers, giving ALIC an important advantage, says Back: “it meant that SLAs, processing and customer experience got better, because our staff were more experienced when things came up with the banks.” His brokers aren’t being ‘tripped up’ by policy changes: “they were more agile in their thinking, which effectively allowed us to remain competitive.”

The brokerage has been open with its clients about the uncertainty in investor lending and used this to improve turnaround times, telling clients ‘to get you what you need we need to bring forward SLA dates; we need to bring forward commitment dates’. 

Responding to regulation

Back has been busy providing feedback to industry associations about ASIC’s Review, which he believes could have positive effects: “we’re supportive of any body of work that helps bolster trust in the finance industry, whether that be big banks or brokers.” He’s more sceptical about the Sedgwick Review: “I’d hate for banks to go back to that oligopoly-style era and try and cut brokers out of the market,” says Back, “that’d be a big step back in time.”

Sedgwick’s recommendations that commissions be uncoupled from loan size is “grasping at straws”, Back argues: “the reality is the larger the loan size, generally the more complex the client. We don’t work with a cookie-cutter approach.” Back has recently been educating brokers on cost-control and understanding their hourly rate and is acutely aware that with a limited fee – such as $1500 a deal – ALIC’s business model would collapse “It’s incredibly dangerous to go down that path for our industry,” Back insists; “it’s not going to add value to the client experience.”

ALIC have taken recent steps to control costs and this year will begin outsourcing basic processing tasks to Manila, freeing up staff in Australia to face clients. Nevertheless the majority of ALIC’s costs are fixed costs, with payroll being particular substantial, meaning growth, recruitment and professional development remain crucial. 

Big targets

Listening to Back, it’s obviously ALIC’s relentless focus on talent is set to continue and with it, the brokerage’s dominance of the Top 10. Back has big plans for his new generation of high-performers: “the brokers coming in have very high targets: first year $40m, second year $60m, third year $80m. What we’re looking to build effectively is a good pool of $80m writers over the next two to three years.”

MPA's Top 10 Independent Brokerages Report is in MPA 17.07, hitting desks on Monday 19th June. We'll be running further insights from the report later this week.