A mortgage agent’s license in Ontario authorizes you to “deal or trade in mortgages”. What takes time to learn is how many ways you can deal or trade in mortgages and how to choose the right niche to specialize in.
You can deal in residential mortgages, commercial mortgages, land or development mortgages, construction mortgages, or all of the above. You can help people find the mortgage they need or help people invest one. There are so many options, but all that choice can be a blessing or a curse and perhaps the most important step to becoming successful in the mortgage business is finding your real focus.
My name is Chris Nichilo and I’m the founder of Switch Private Mortgages. It took me a long time to learn that a jack of all trades is also a master of none. At Switch we’re a one trick pony and our pursuit is the mastery of that one trick only.
We only deal in private mortgages and we only put mortgages on residential properties in Ontario. It’s a full-time job for multiple people and putting our entire focus on one thing has allowed us to create a product that Ontario brokers can consistently depend on for competitive pricing and highly efficient service.
We’re not a MIC and we’re not a bank which allows us to take the most flexible approach to private mortgage lending possible and we understand the most important thing about being a broker – you don’t make money unless a mortgage gets funded.
Everything we do is designed to make it easier for you to arrange a private mortgage for your clients without having to put in a lot of time or do a lot of work before you know we can help. Our underwriters are trained to approved loans over the phone without you having to do a formal application, pull a credit bureau, order an appraisal, or collect supporting documentation upfront. All of that takes time and can be done once we have a general understanding of your client’s circumstances and a genuine interest in approving them for a loan.
It shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes on the phone for us to know whether your client can get approved and determine a general range of pricing. From there, depending on how confident you are with what your client has told you about their circumstances, we can either produce a conditional commitment subject to changes based on things like an appraisal or the accuracy of the information you provided upfront OR we can give you a range of pricing and let you go and verify some details with your client before quoting a formal number in a commitment. It’s totally up to you and it’s the way it should be.
I said we were a one trick pony, but I didn’t tell you what the trick was. It’s service. There’s no such thing as a cheap private mortgage, everyone knows that. The best private mortgage partner you can have isn’t the one that baits you with a rate they’ll never fund at or changes the game on you from deal to deal just because they can. The best partner you can have in the private mortgage space is the one that costs you the least amount of time and helps you close the most transactions. We do it with a strict focus on working efficiently, a standardized scoring and pricing system that is published and fair, and a serious commitment to the men and women in the brokering world that bring us the business we need to keep our lights on and doors open.
Give us a shot and experience the Switch difference yourself. You won’t be disappointed.
