Broker education should remain an ongoing project
Becoming a mortgage broker asks a lot from the prospective professional, as Sadiq Boodoo, principal broker of Ontario-based brokerage Approved Financial Services, can attest to.
“I have been working for 18 years in the mortgage/lending industry, starting out with Canada Trust/TD as a teller and working my way up to management level,” Boodoo said in a recent interview with Canadian Mortgage Professional. “I then shifted into being a mortgage specialist before moving over to the brokering side.”
Boodoo said that the early parts immediately after the shift was challenging.
“Going from knowing one lender inside and out to having to learn about various lenders, their products, and systems was overwhelming at the beginning,” Boodoo said. “Gradually, I worked my way through it by taking one day at a time and leveraged my friends and contacts to help me navigate through things until I got a good grasp of them for myself.”
Read more: “I initially thought I had made a huge mistake.”
Continuous broker education is an advocacy of Scott Peckford, a Kelowna-based broker and podcast host. In 2021, Peckford launched the ILMB (I Love Mortgage Brokering) Mortgage Pros brokerage, an organization that offers a longer-term focus on training and education of industry newcomers.
“For over 40 hours a week, we have live Zoom rooms with underwriting coaches that our agents can go ask questions to all the time,” Peckford said. “They don’t have a mentor that they have to email and hopefully hear back [from] in three days. We hire really great people, and we pay them well to be able to support our agents so that we can help them have success.”
“I always say that there’s no problem in somebody’s business that somebody else hasn’t already solved. Your challenge is [finding out] who’s got the answer,” he added.
More pointers for those who are new to the mortgage industry and are looking to succeed in the long term can be viewed here.
