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The Adviser speaks to Rapid Finance managing director Michael Cullinan about the ins and outs of specialist lending, and the huge opportunity it offers brokers.
How long have you been offering specialist lending?
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Rapid Finance has been around since 2001, and we've been doing specialist lending for eight years.
What are the benefits of brokers offering specialist lending?
The biggest benefit is helping the consumer. It’s fantastic because the customer must have had a bit of trouble through normal channels and they approach us to assist them, and the smile at the end of the day is the best reward of all.
Is it easy to write a specialist loan?
It’s a little bit different to your traditional conforming mortgage, so there’s a lot more evaluation work and more research done in the sense of looking over a customer’s documents.
Do specialist lenders support you?
The lenders in this space are all fantastic. They all spend time with you on the individual deal. They will spend time with you training your staff or your team members in relation to it. All of the specialist lenders are very, very helpful.
How significant is the opportunity for brokers in this space?
I think it’s huge. There are a lot of people who have had life events out there that have had some kind of circumstance in their life. I think if you’re a mortgage broker and you can do conforming loans and want to offer the one-stop shop to the customer, I think if you can offer that service to the customer, you can write more business, which is obviously beneficial to your business.
When positive credit reporting or comprehensive credit reporting comes in, I foresee that some of the banks will tighten up their lending criteria, so I think specialist lending will become a bigger area for brokers in the future.
For brokers looking to move into specialist lending, what are the first steps they should take?
I would suggest talking to specialist lenders to understand how they operate – how they tick as a lender. From there, do a bit of marketing towards it by going through your current client base and see if you can find some customers that fall into that sort of category. Once you've got a scenario, ring each of the specialist lenders, run it by them and then you’ll start to build an understanding of how specialist lending really works.
