Solid experience and a drive for knowledge are crucial to making it in the mortgage space, lender exec says
Lengthy stints in major industry movers have given Anish Pabari, senior partner at Elite Lending Corporation, the perspective needed to remain a relevant presence in the constantly evolving mortgage space.
Having entered the mortgage industry as early as 2008, Pabari cut his teeth selling high-interest mortgages at Wells Fargo, before moving to TD to serve as manager of residential mortgages for five years.
“I’ve been part of the broker community since 2014,” Pabari told Canadian Mortgage Professional. “Sales has been my career since my early 20s and being in Vancouver where real estate provides one of the largest financial opportunities, I was bound to end up in real estate. With math and numbers being strong assets of mine, mortgages seemed like an obvious option.”
Pabari said that the earliest years of his career shaped his approach in what would become his two specialities: B lending and private lending.
“I learned to make sure my team and I have relationships with all managers and underwriters in the B space,” Pabari said. “I also learn to understand businesses and financial statements, as well as build pertinent relationships with mortgage investment corporations and individual private lenders at all levels – from families with $500,000 HELOCs to rich investors lending $10 million or more annually.”
Pabari noted that getting the hang of these intricacies is not easy, which is where a would-be broker’s initiative should come in.
“Educate yourself constantly on policies, lenders, rates, and market news,” he said. “You will figure the rest out as you go along.”
The personal touch also played a significant role in entrenching Elite Lending’s enduring place in the Canadian mortgage industry. Pabari said that he particularly takes pride in his company’s social responsibility drive.
“[Among] all the work Elite Cares, the giving arm of Elite Lending, has done over the years highlights… include raising over $13,000 for the BC Children’s Hospital with multiple campaigns; regular scarf and sock drives during the Christmas season; donating $5,000 for Habitat for Humanity and having the team go to a site to build homes for underprivileged families; working with World Housing to donate $7,000 where the majority of our brokers gave up a portion of their pay per deal; and multiple soup kitchens courtesy of Elite Lending’s management team and brokers,” he said.
Pabari also said that the company recognizes the invaluable voices from every segment of society, noting that Elite Lending went “from an all boys’ club to an almost 50/50 ratio between our female and male brokers, along with the diversity in the group and the different backgrounds of people we have.”
“The numerous awards we have been nominated for and won helped us feel confident we were on the right path,” he said. “We have gotten to the point at Elite Lending where the growth is organic and broker- as well as management-driven.”
However, the drastic global emergency of the past two years proved daunting, Pabari recounted.
“At Elite Lending, the most challenging time was at the beginning of the pandemic when things were at a standstill. There were new government rules coming out all the time, and a lot of people were scared,” Pabari said.
“The way that we handled it was by coming together and getting proactive about an online strategy so our brokers could continue to learn and work with minimal disruption. Our weekly meetings and classroom training went into an online format as well.”
With the company reaching a new milestone despite the crisis, Elite Lending soon proved more than equal to these challenges, Pabari said.
“Elite Lending has grown from 60 brokers in January 2021 to a total of 120 in January 2022. We are so happy to have doubled through the pandemic.”
Pabari said none of that would have been possible without the most valuable skill that an executive should have: “figuring out your team members’ zones of genius and using this to maximize output by allowing staff to do the activities that the company needs to get done.”
Crucially, these activities should provide the team “the most joy and the gratification that they are the best at it,” he stressed. “This also helped us figure out where we lacked as a team, and this allowed us to make better hiring decisions.”
