A mortgage brokerage has cautioned property managers against partnering with the wrong type of brokers for referrals.
In The Property Management Excellence (PMX) Podcast with REB director and Managed co-founder Alex Whitlock, Finni Mortgages principal Eva Loisance cautioned property managers against assuming that having any broker on hand is the same as having the right one.
Many real estate agencies have some form of broker arrangement, but most of those brokers are generalists, and a significant number of them are not being engaged by the agency’s own clients.
Loisance – who is the principal of a brokerage that works exclusively with property investors across Australia – said the referral relationships that work best for property management are built on investment specialisation, not proximity.
“A lot of rental or property manager offices actually do wish to have a broker in-house, but it comes with a lot of compliance and licensing and all that, so it gets quite tricky,” Loisance said.
She pointed to industry data that raises questions about the effectiveness of in-house broker models. A survey conducted by REB found that many agencies with an in-house broker reported that their own clients were not using that broker’s services.
“If you have an in-house broker, they’re usually a jack of all trades… you don’t have one for sales and one for PM. A lot of my clients don’t like to deal with one-stop shops. It’s a bit of a conflict of interest.”
The distinction matters, she said, because property investors have fundamentally different financing needs from owner-occupiers. Complex trust structures, self-managed super fund purchases, portfolio-level debt management, and equity release strategies are all standard territory for an investment-specialist broker and well outside the scope of a generalist dealing primarily with home buyers.
“More sophisticated investors would absolutely go, no – they’d go and pick and choose who’s best for what,” Loisance said.
The property managers Loisance works with do not need to understand the mechanics of the loans themselves. They need to understand enough to start a conversation and trust the broker they are referring to, she said.
Loisance reassured property managers that establishing a referral relationship with brokers is feasible and “too easy not to give it a try”.
“The one we work with is like, okay, well, it just took a phone call, it just took a name and number, and then these clients are now on the second property or moving forward.”
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