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Sydney broker Ollie Lum reveals how a flood of enquiries and demand from first home buyers inspired him to hold info nights to educate borrowers and streamline his own process.
Speaking to The Adviser’s Elite Broker podcast, residential loan writer at AAA Mortgages, Ollie Lum, revealed that he had seen the number of first home buyer customers coming to him triple over the past 15 months.
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Indeed, there has been particularly strong demand coming from this cohort in recent months, spurred by record-low interest rates, the prospect of falling house prices and various government grants, including the First Home Loan Deposit Scheme and the HomeBuilder grant.
As such, Mr Lum said he was looking to ways to service these customers more efficiently.
“I’d been inundated with first home buyers, and I love these guys,” he told The Adviser.
“I was thinking: ‘I’ve got all of these first home buyers. What can I do?’ And this is all about me being a bit more efficient.”
Mr Lum told The Adviser that he decided to host an information seminar in Sydney earlier this month, gathering a panel of speakers who specialise in various fields including real estate (real estate agents), lending (business development managers) and conveyancing (conveyancer).
His aim was to gather as many of his FHB clients as possible to educate them on the mortgages process and providing them with an opportunity to ask questions to the panel of specialists.
For Mr Lum, the purpose of the FHB information night was not to streamline his back-end process such as data entry tasks, but to drive efficiencies in his face-to-face interactions with his clients.
He told The Adviser that he wanted to “increase the surface area of knowledge and education”, with the information night providing an opportunity to educate a larger number of clients in the one forum, simultaneously.
“It was set up to follow the process and to field a lot of questions from these FHBs, because they’ve got a lot of questions.”
Mr Lum outlined that FHBs do not just crave credit advice but are also brimming with questions about the process they have to go through with lenders, real estate agents and particularly conveyancers.
In fact, Mr Lum said he has observed that many FHBs do not know what a conveyancer is and what their role is in a mortgage process.
“Never skimp on a conveyancer is what I always say because they could catch something that could be catastrophic,” he advised.
One of Mr Lum’s endeavours is to ask his clients valuable, suitable questions to learn as much as he can about them before he decides how best to service them, he said.
“I’m really trying to do what I do well and do more of what I do well and fill in the holes of the parts which I don’t do as well with other resources,” he said.
You can listen to the full Elite Broker podcast with Ollie Lum below.
