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ISCOVER
Jessica Darnbrough
Australia’s aggregators have rubbished the findings of the latest Market Intelligence Strategy Centre (MISC) report, labelling it as as “vague”.
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Earlier this week, MISC revealed Australia’s top five aggregator groups had lost 13 per cent broker business share and were now accounting for just 49 per cent of all broker-originated loans.
However, this data has been dismissed by some of Australia’s largest aggregators, who claim the report is “lacking detail” and does not reflect their own statistics.
Mortgage Choice’s chief executive Michael Russell said the company had performed well towards the end of last year.
“We ended the year really strongly and have started this year in a good position as well,” he told The Adviser.
According to Mr Russell, Mortgage Choice’s approvals were up 16 per cent in January in comparison to last year and up 25 per cent in February.
“Of real significance is that our Queensland business has rebounded strongly following the horrible floods that swept through QLD in December 2010 and January 2011 – with our approvals up 55 per cent and 35 per cent for January and February respectively,” he said.
“We all know that Queenslanders are renowned for their gritty resilience and we're certainly seeing it first hand at the moment.”
Mr Russell also said the lender was not part of MISC’s broker pool, and as such, never provided lending data to the company.
Mortgage Choice is not the only aggregator that does not provide data to MISC. AFG, Australia’s largest aggregator, is another brokerage that doesn’t provide its lending statistics to MISC.
But MISC research director Brent Hughes said that MISC was not reliant on all brokerage groups submitting their figures.
“Our pool is made up of both brokerage groups and lenders. If the aggregator doesn’t provide their data to us, we simply get their data from the lenders they deal with,” he said.
Mr Hughes also refused to accept claims that the report was not in line with the aggregator’s internal data.
“What we have seen and shown in the report, is that while some aggregators have grown over the last 12 months, others have not,” he said.
One aggregator that has definitely grown over the last 12 months is Connective.
Speaking to The Adviser, Connective principal Mark Haron said the company had grown 34.9 per cent in the last quarter of 2011 compared to the same quarter of 2010.
“We are continuing to grow nicely and I know that a lot of Australia’s other top aggregators are the same,” he said.
