This "weird and funny" guy closed $90 million last year and is always open to learning more
Eitan Pinsky doesn’t take himself too seriously.
He likes to make jokes and put clients at ease but is always clear that when it comes to business, he means business.
“I always tell my clients, ‘Just so you know, I may not take myself very seriously, but I take your mortgage very seriously. So if I make jokes it’s because I’m having fun, but I’ll never make a joke about your mortgage,” Pinsky said
Pinsky is only in his sixth year in the industry, but he’s adopted a mindset that has taken some brokers decades to master: he’s looking at it like a business, as opposed to being just a mortgage professional.
“I feel like I’m a businessperson in mortgages,” Pinsky said. “I’m not looking at just me as the person bringing the files in; it’s the company as being able to work with the files. The hard thing is being able to provide the same advice, same service, same experience for each person that I was able to provide three or four years ago when I was on my own.”
In 2018, he closed around $90 million. He hasn’t changed much in terms of his business strategy over the past few years, which is setting a goal and then working backwards and breaking it down into steps in order to get there. It’s a very numbers-based approached, and it works. This method allows Pinksy to see on a month or even weekly basis, where the team is in terms of reaching their goal.
He launched his own brokerage, Pinsky Mortgages, under DLC Origin, but didn’t start out wanting to own his own mortgage company. In British Columbia, however, brokers are required to incorporate, so that’s what he did. He hired his first employee in 2016, and today he has three salaried employees and two other brokers working under him.
Pinsky got his start at RBC, but he doesn’t associate that with any part of his mortgage career. He was hired because he was planning on becoming an investment advisor, but he quickly found that “there was too much politics in the big bank,” and that didn’t mesh well with the way he wanted to do business.
Even though he doesn’t attribute any of success to his days at the bank, one good thing that came out of his experience there was learning not to waste time.
“I learned really early on that I have to know what a good use of my time is and be critical of where I put my efforts,” Pinsky said. That translates to the work that he takes on at the brokerage, which is almost entirely residential real estate transactions, whether they’re A-paper, B-paper, or, private.
Pinsky has a history of teaching positions, and the need to educate people is why Pinsky wanted to be a financial planner. When the opportunity arose to get into mortgages, however, he found that he really liked it. And even though the first couple of years as a mortgage broker were rough ones (he made $9,000 and $5,000, respectively), he knew it would work eventually.
“I like to educate people about what we’re doing, and I have a knack for understanding if somebody understand what I’m saying,” Pinsky said. That’s a good reason why his team insists on meeting clients in person, sometimes twice, in order to ensure that their body language matches their verbal affirmations.
Pinsky’s main driver of clients is his realtor base. He thinks realtors are “fantastic” and says that brokers who say they don’t like working with realtors probably don’t like it because they’re not doing so effectively.
“You have to manage everybody’s expectations. It might be a little bit more work because you have to put in that extra phone call to that realtor, but there is no one source of business that is more lucrative for the time and effort that you put in than realtors. They’re always going to be the best,” he said.
Going forward, he hopes to continue building strong partnerships with realtors as well as stoke his part client database, which is only now starting to get going as his first set of clients are coming up for renewals. Although Google reviews has helped him gain visibility, he’s more a fan of in-person events, such as parties.
Pinsky hosts events for realtors and past clients and recognizes realtors who have given him a lot of business. He’s found that public recognition goes a long way and enhances the personability of his team.
“I think there’s a misconception that realtors are competing and that we’re not allowed to have other realtors; all of my realtors are friends first and associates second,” Pinsky said. “I want to be everybody’s friend and I want everybody to look at us and say, ‘this is a team that really cares,’ so that’s why we take care of them.”
Pinsky is a big fan of coaching, and is currently with The Core training program, which is based in the U.S. You don’t know what you don’t know, he said, but he’s never trying to reinvent the wheel. Instead, he wants to learn what others know and use it to his benefit. Not enough brokers put themselves in their clients’ shoes and think about what they want to see when they want to see.
To Pinsky, that makes all the difference.
“You don’t have to be that smart to be good at this job,” Pinsky said. “Be knowledgeable, do a good job, be a good person, be relatable, don’t take yourself too seriously.”
