A MoneySense article entitled “5 things your mortgage broker isn’t telling you” has won the scorn of one broker who believes it is misleading and biased.
A MoneySense article entitled “5 things your mortgage broker isn’t telling you” has won the scorn of one broker who believes it is misleading and biased.
“I’ve never seen anything more blatant and I can’t believe a journalist wrote this without getting both sides of the story,” Kent Farnsworth of Mortgage Alliance Simply Mortgages told MortgageBrokerNews.ca. “It really feels like it came from a bank; the information that she is projecting out there ... every point she makes I’ve heard them all from clients who just walked out of a bank.”
In the critical article, which appeared in the February/March issue of MoneySense, authour Kira Vermond makes a number of suggestions about brokers, including that their commission structure “could be” a conflict of interest, that brokers are “newbies” and that they aren’t capable of finding a mortgage for clients who lack high credit scores.
For some industry players this article will be reminiscent of a branded RBC document released by a mobile specialist in 2011 that purported a number of controversial claims about mortgage brokers, including “brokers will farm out your mortgage to a number of companies and then will set you up with a financial institution based on only the lowest rate, no other factors.”
Farnsworth, a broker entering his tenth year in the business, specifically took umbrage with the MoneySense article’s assertion that brokers are inexperienced.
“There was another point that said all mortgage brokers are newbies (and) we’re not educated enough,” Farnsworth said. “It’s like a direct, personal attack against mortgage brokers.”
With brokers constantly jockeying for market share with the banks, Farnsworth feels the information presented in the article corroborates the untruths told by bankers to their clients.
“She just put a really negative spin on it: ‘Mortgage brokers are paid commission so they’re going to screw you every time,’ is what it sounds like (she is saying),” Farnsworth said. “Where she could have (also) said, maybe they’ll work really hard for you because if they don’t get the mortgage completed they don’t get paid.”
And it seems readers agree, with one commenter stating, “your mandate is to educate your readers and I think this article did the opposite.”
Click here to read the article.
“I’ve never seen anything more blatant and I can’t believe a journalist wrote this without getting both sides of the story,” Kent Farnsworth of Mortgage Alliance Simply Mortgages told MortgageBrokerNews.ca. “It really feels like it came from a bank; the information that she is projecting out there ... every point she makes I’ve heard them all from clients who just walked out of a bank.”
In the critical article, which appeared in the February/March issue of MoneySense, authour Kira Vermond makes a number of suggestions about brokers, including that their commission structure “could be” a conflict of interest, that brokers are “newbies” and that they aren’t capable of finding a mortgage for clients who lack high credit scores.
For some industry players this article will be reminiscent of a branded RBC document released by a mobile specialist in 2011 that purported a number of controversial claims about mortgage brokers, including “brokers will farm out your mortgage to a number of companies and then will set you up with a financial institution based on only the lowest rate, no other factors.”
Farnsworth, a broker entering his tenth year in the business, specifically took umbrage with the MoneySense article’s assertion that brokers are inexperienced.
“There was another point that said all mortgage brokers are newbies (and) we’re not educated enough,” Farnsworth said. “It’s like a direct, personal attack against mortgage brokers.”
With brokers constantly jockeying for market share with the banks, Farnsworth feels the information presented in the article corroborates the untruths told by bankers to their clients.
“She just put a really negative spin on it: ‘Mortgage brokers are paid commission so they’re going to screw you every time,’ is what it sounds like (she is saying),” Farnsworth said. “Where she could have (also) said, maybe they’ll work really hard for you because if they don’t get the mortgage completed they don’t get paid.”
And it seems readers agree, with one commenter stating, “your mandate is to educate your readers and I think this article did the opposite.”
Click here to read the article.
