Rajan Kaushal began his career in the broker channel, working for his father’s brokerage and gaining insight into underwriting criteria
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Rajan Kaushal began his career in the broker channel, working for his father’s brokerage and gaining insight into underwriting criteria. Given everything he’s learned, it’s not surprising that he would go on to launch one of Canada’s most successful mortgage finance companies.
“What drew me to alternative lending was that I felt that I was helping people,” Kaushal, the president of Tribecca Finance, told CMP. “I realized that many consumers were creditworthy, however, did not qualify for loans and mortgages under traditional financial institution guidelines. This was my inspiration to establish Tribecca.”
Kaushal founded Tribecca in 1999 and immediately began offering a multitude of loan and mortgage products, but with what he calls a “common sense approach to lending.” He immediately began fulfilling a need in the marketplace.
“One of the key elements to having a successful business is providing products or services that benefit your customer,” he said. “My vision for Tribecca was to implement several mortgage and loan products to meet different needs, whether it be a first mortgage to help people achieve home ownership, a second mortgage to consolidate debts, or provide capital to self-employed customers for their business, or a construction loan for someone to build the house of their dreams.”
But it all goes back to the broker channel and, specifically, what his father imparted to him.
“My father owned a brokerage company and I worked with him. As a broker, I worked with many types of lenders, banks, trust companies, credit unions, and private lenders. I got to understand how different lenders think and the differences in their underwriting criteria. I did both residential and commercial mortgages and had an understanding of different underwriting processes and the way different lenders thought, in terms of providing mortgages and why they either would or wouldn’t. It was a very good level of experience to understand different mindsets and underwriting and approval processes—why they would decline deals and what they were looking for. I learned to identify the weaknesses in files.”
Canada does not teem with financial institutions, but the ones it has are fastidious in their lending guidelines, and that’s made the alternative space indispensable. Kaushal says its importance has been amplified by the changes B-20 spurred over the last couple of years.
“It’s extremely important for brokers to have relationships with alternative lenders because, even though clients go to brokers for all kinds of reasons, it’s most commonly because they’ve been turned down by an institution and they’re looking for their mortgage broker to prove them options for funding. I think it’s imperative that brokers have relationships with alternative lenders and I only see the alternative space growing.”
