One leading player is not satisfied with existing mortgage professional associations and proposes one run by brokers for brokers.
One leading player is not satisfied with existing mortgage professional associations and proposes one run by brokers for brokers.
“There are a lot of issues around running our broker channel that need representation on a national level,” Blair Anderson of MortgageResource.ca told MortgageBrokerNews.ca. “I would like to propose the Canadian Mortgage Brokers Association (CMBA), and there needs to be equal representation between regions, and small and large brokerages.”
Anderson, who has over 20 years of service as a broker under his belt, believes the unification of brokers under one organization is the best way to tackle the issues that plague the industry. It can also help better educate the public about what the mortgage broker industry has to offer.
“Once we have established a unified front, only then we can tackle the problems like REDX, imposed minimum volume requirements, an advertising fund, exclusivity contracts, etc.,” he said. “(The industry) hasn’t grown in 20 years the way I want it to because we can’t do any advertising -- we could allot a small percentage of deals to an advertising fund that can be used to promote the channel.”
And the template of how such an organization would operate already exists.
“Perhaps we don’t need to look any further than the model used by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce; they represent a network of over 420 chambers of commerce and boards of trade, representing 192,000 businesses of all sizes in all sectors of the economy and in all regions,” he said. “No one will fight harder for brokers than brokers. We just need to get organized.”
Though he knows organizing such a large scale operation would be no small task, perhaps broaching the subject is the first step to mounting action.
“I’m equally guilty of talking about it and not doing much more but if we’re serious about it – and there are a lot of people out there who would be interested – it’s just a matter of getting organized,” Anderson said. “(There are) too many interest groups. Like our provincial associations, we need one at the national level, with exclusive representation for the broker channel.”
