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The CEO of online mortgage broker uno Home Loans has said that the company is looking to hire more home loan advisers because borrowers “ultimately won’t go through to loans unless people are involved”.
The online mortgage brokerage, in line with its expansion, is currently looking to hire between 12 and 15 people to the customer-facing roles of home loan consultant and home loan adviser.
Speaking to The Adviser, CEO Vincent Turner said: “We’re still seeing 15–20 per cent growth month on month, which is being driven by what we’re doing in the digital sense. People are coming and trying the platform, but, ultimately, they won’t go through to loans unless people are involved. So, the consultants and advisers and support need to scale accordingly.”
Mr Turner said that he hopes to grow the home loan team by around 50 per cent. He added that the company is recruiting home loan consultants with one to two years of experience, those going to be the first point of call for borrowers, as well as home loan advisers who will provide the recommendations and credit proposals.
According to the CEO, the platform’s current home loan advisers are former brokers or mortgage lending representatives from banks who have an average of nine years of experience each.
Mr Turner said: “Our home loan advisers are Cert IV/Diploma holders and our advisers have, on average, nine years’ worth of mortgage experience. They operate like a broker within our business, but they are on a salary.
“What is driving this is that six months ago, we realised that we were going to have to both be really strong in the technology side of things (which we already are) and also really strong on the people side.
“We spent about six months bedding in what that looks like, so we got a lot more confident around the consultant role and the adviser role and the support role and what we’re hiring for and how to train people anyhow to get them to be really high-performing in their role.”
Advisers are held up to broker benchmark
Mr Turner said that the group compares advisers to the top-performing brokers. He said: “For us, we use the benchmark of what a top 25 broker looks. How many deals are they doing? How many interactions are they having? What kind of volume are they doing? And we’re now operating at an individual adviser level at that level.
“So, we’re ready to now scale that.”
He added: “For the people that do join us, whether they are coming out of broking or mortgage lending, a lot of the time the reason why they are attracted to us is that they want that support, they want better technology, better training, better career development, and that is a lot of why we are attracting the kind of people who are ultimately successful here.
“Software changes in a bank can be slow and that can be frustrating. And in the broking environment, a lot of the time you are running your own business and you pretty much hang up your own shingle and that can be quite daunting.
“So, giving people another option where they have great, collegiate support environment with tech that changes very quickly, so your job gets more efficient day in and day out but still get to be front line doing the thing you like best, which is helping people get a mortgage and get into homes.”
[Related: Westpac investing $26.5m in mortgage fintech]