Brokerage or bust!
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05/09/2011 10:00:00 AM
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Certain lenders are officially off limits to Montreal brokers – whether their “no entry” signs are in French or in English. But the key word there is “officially,” leaving Terry Kilakos, broker/ owner of VERICO North East Mortgages (NordEst Hypothèque), just enough wiggle room to present a deal at Desjardins Credit Union or, even, RBC – two lenders that officially avoid the broker channel like the plague. There is, however, a big “but.”
“It’s really something I’ve done only as a last resort and if my client has a relationship with that lender, which has given them access to a rate that I can’t match,” he tells CMP. It’s through personal relationships at the branch level that I’m able to take the deal to RBC and still get 50 basis points for referral. At Desjardins, I’m able to get in there and actually broker the deal and earn 80 basis points. But, again, it’s a sort of last option and I still manage to retain the client afterwards.”
The strategy relies on equal parts know-how, tenacity and charm and has helped grow North East into one of Montreal’s fastest developing mortgage players. Kilakos has more than tripled his sales team in the last year, the growth setting him on trajectory to claim as much as $100 million in funded volume this year – a 150 per cent rise over the $40 million in 2010. The numbers are all the more impressive given Montreal’s relatively low home values.
Much of that growth should come from Kilakos’s inroads into the majority Francophone community, building on the 20 per cent of the firm’s fi les coming from that market, which some argue is already super-saturated with mortgage brokers. That hasn’t deterred Kilakos, both a former financial planner and marketing specialist.
“It’s the dominant market, but many Anglophone and Allophone brokers have not been able to tap it,” says the Montreal native, a member of the city’s large Greek community. “But what we’ve done here at North East is bring onboard four Laval brokers from the Francophone community. They are already focused on servicing the needs of the community there.”
With a price tag of $285,000, the average North East origination is more than $130K above the area average. It’s also more likely than not to be on a house in a predominately English-speaking West Island, also home to a large Greek community.
“I didn’t do my first deal for a fellow Greek client until three years after I was licensed as a
Chartered Real Estate Mortgage Agent,” says Kilakos, a bit like a prophet in his hometown. “But then I developed a bit of a name for myself as a broker who really knew what he was doing and I was being interviewed by the local media a fair bit and that really helped to grow my business in the community.”
Kilakos is now a go-to personality for both radio and television producers looking for a mortgage business to help navigate consumers through Montreal’s increasingly complex market. Kilakos’s marketing background has helped him to promote the firm and the brand he created in May 2007, before officially joining forces with Verico in July. While the business name changed, Kilakos held onto the goodwill he’d created while operating under the old banner.
“I’ve always marketed my business under my name,” he says, “It’s something that will never change and it helped me when I decided to go independent. In fact, I conducted my own market research with my clients to make sure that it wouldn’t affect my business. It hasn’t.”
Leaving the broker network system behind, and creating an entirely independent brokerage, was also an option, industry veterans advised him against.
“I was already producing enough volume with most lenders to receive top-tier volume bonuses and I knew that we would very soon be able to win that with all the lenders we deal with after going independent,” Kilakos, 35, tells CMP, “but the argument advisers made in encouraging me to join Verico was that I could access those volume bonuses from day one on joining Verico. Why wait three months? They were right.”
North East is one of only four brokerages in Verico’s Montreal family. There are four others throughout Quebec, most attracted to the network for the same reasons Kilakos points to – back-office and technological support for both the brokerage and its agents.
Kilakos brought his expanding team to the broker network after first meeting with Verico executives in B.C. He’d later join them in Las Vegas in the summer for their Business Forum. The resulting meeting of the minds was helped along by the Verico training support North East brokers will now access, what Kilakos views as another way of distinguishing his team from more than 2,000 competitors.
“Unfortunately, our industry struggles with a large number of unqualified people, who have tarnished the industry’s name,” he says. “There are just too many of them out there fighting for business.”
Now with just under five years in the industry, Kilakos has now put some distance between himself and that often maddening crowd. With the move to establish his business as a full-fl edged brokerage, he will in fact leave much of the lead generation to his agents, relying on his own bulging book of 500 clients to generate new business for himself.
“I’ve now been in the business long enough that many of my original clients are renewing or needing refis or making new purchases,” he says. “In fact, by coincidence, the first client I ever had was also the first client for North East Mortgages. It was touching to know that they’d returned to me and would start me off in my own brokerage.”
Coincidence aside, Kilakos resists calling it “luck.”
“People say I’m lucky,” he tells CMP, a grin on his face, “but I find that the harder, I work the luckier I get.