Top 100 broker on the value of keeping your nose to the grindstone
Brokers looking for a secret sauce to jumpstart their success can often forget that making waves in the mortgage industry can come down to one simple thing: plain old hard work.
That’s what Helen Avis (pictured above), director of finance at Specialist Mortgage, attributes her success to. Avis, who has more than 30 years of industry experience, settled $145 million in loans in the 2020/2021 financial year alone, securing her place on MPA’s Top 100 Brokers list for 2021.
“I guess overall, it’s just hard work, you know?” Avis told MPA. “The market has been crazy, you know – prices have been going through the roof and people have been jumping in to try and secure their home, their future home. Before you know [it], they literally get priced out of the market.”
Avis, who deals mainly with overseas clients, said the extended approval times her customers often faced were among the biggest challenges for her business.
“There’s a limited amount of lenders that we can look at, because a lot of the banks don’t lend to people living overseas with foreign income,” she said. “And because of that, and the volume of loans that the banks have to process together with all the documents that they have to go through, it takes a lot of time. And so the assessment time has completely blown out. You know, at one point we were looking at over a month – so by the time you submitted the loan to the bank, it would take a month before they would pick it up. So, it just became a logjam.”
Read next: MPA Top 100 Brokers 2021: Helen Avis
Avis said she appreciated being recognized as a Top 100 broker.
“You know, I’ve never put myself forward for anything. And this year, I just thought … ‘OK, you know, I'll put myself forward. And yeah, it’s been great. It’s great to be recognized for the work that you do.”
