Ouch! A MortgageBrokerNews.ca article profiling Realtors who expect to be paid for the referrals they send brokers hit a sore spot with readers Monday.
Ouch! A MortgageBrokerNews.ca article profiling Realtors who expect to be paid for the referrals they send brokers hit a sore spot with readers Monday.
“I have maybe three or four Realtors I work with, and that’s it,” said Ryan Kirwan, broker with HQ Mortgages. “I don’t compensate any of them, as they see me as an extension of their arm.
“They know I will work hard for them.”
While he and other Ontario brokers value those referrals, a growing number reject outright the need to share commissions or pay for clients. They inundated the site with comments squarely against the practice, in reacting to an article Monday.
For Kirwan, the experienced and successful Realtors will never ask for a paid referral.
“They don’t care about the points, because they know true success comes from a broker and Realtor working together. You only have five days for financing, and that’s not a lot of time for shopping around to find a lender,” he told mortgagebrokernews.ca. “But we can find a lender with just a few clicks of a button. Most brokers work that way – we are judged by our efficiency in getting the deal done.”
The popularity of paid referrals from brokers to Realtors in Quebec has to spread to other provinces, but Realtors expecting to be paid for those referred clients are in the “80” range of the “80/20 rule,” said Kirwan.
“The good Realtors, the successful Realtors, don’t care about the points,” said Kirwan. “It is the 80/20 rule – you have 20 per cent of the Realtors doing 80 per cent of the business, with those other 80 per cent of Realtors fighting for every dollar they can make. They are the ones pushing for referral fees.”
Kirwan has worked in the Sudbury market for five years now, and says that his best clients come from bank or Realtor referrals.
“And business has been steady,” he said. “I haven’t seen any up- or downticks.”
