Innovation helping industry breathe easier

Jason Henneberry is one of the most recognizable names in the country’s mortgage industry because chances are you’re using something he helped create to make your job easier

By Neil Sharma

30 May 2018

Jason Henneberry is one of the most recognizable names in the country’s mortgage industry because chances are you’re using something he helped create to make your job easier.

Henneberry, a partner with Tango Financial, is part of the team that brought the industry DocAssist, which eliminates many of the monotonous administrative tasks brokers would much rather do without.

“We took our internal administration processes and opened them up for other brokers to plug into,” Henneberry told MortgageBrokerNews.ca. “Our whole approach has been to scratch our own itch and then make our tools and services available for the rest of the industry. Along the way, we’ve just looked at our own processes in our own brokerages and found ways to be more efficient, and whenever the opportunity presented itself if we came across a good idea, we’d test the idea with a few close partners. If it looked like we were onto something, we’d put a little more energy into it.”

Turns out Henneberry scratched an industry-wide itch with LenderSpotlight, which has become an invaluable broker tool because of B-20 guidelines. Henneberry essentially created a cheat sheet of lenders and knew he was onto something after receiving feedback from his own agents.

“On the heels of the mortgage rule changes, we realized reading a rate sheet was incredibly difficult, so again we scratched our own itch,” he said. “We built a rudimentary version of LenderSpotlight and gave it to our agents, and they loved it so much because they realized they couldn’t do their jobs as effectively without it.”

LenderSpotlight bought out and subsumed Niche Sheet, which provides vital information about rural properties, maximum acreages, key appraisal contacts for lenders, child tax credit incomes, land policies, and has many more features.

Not one to sit still, Henneberry and co-creator Darryll Esch just unveiled STREAM5 Social to help brokers brand better, but without compromising themselves to the competition.

“It’s a cooperative marketing platform that publishes the same articles you read on the Globe and Mail and Financial Post, but the site is branded to you as an individual broker,” he said. “The only thing a client can see, do or interact with is you and your brand. All the articles are published to a single site, the platform, and every single day we send out a list of the newly published articles to everyone on our service with a link unique to that broker. The broker can put it anywhere they want—they can email it out to clients, they can put it on their Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn feeds—and when someone clicks on it they’ll be directed to read the article but the site will rebrand itself to the broker.”

As for what Henneberry is planning next: PayAssist, a full payroll and compliance tool that’s similar to LenderSpotlight. While details are sparse, there’s a good chance brokers will be using it as much as Henneberry’s previous tools.