Jordan Hagicostas

Q. Why and how did you become a broker?

I went to uni after school, studying accounting and corporate finance, and came to a point throughout my degree where I figured, “I’m fairly good at talking to people and I actually like providing a service as opposed to being behind the desk crunching numbers”.

A position came up at local brokerage here in Adelaide [Rise High Financial Solutions] as a loan processor. That opened the door to what mortgage broking was like and how it works. From the first day I said, “I love this industry so much. I would do this work for free.”

Q. What made you decide to become an Aussie broker?

For me, I needed a brand that I believed in and felt could bring business my way. I felt that the Aussie brand and what they were building and what they’d done over 20-plus years was so impressive. Seeing the advertisements growing up as a kid and knowing that it’s a household name is something that really resonated with me.

There is a training support program that they have for onboarding new brokers with the graduate program. Having that intensive hands-on experience, actually training to become a broker, and doing it with a group of people, with a graduate manager was something that really appealed to me.

I wanted that extra support so that I could learn how to do everything the right way as opposed to failing and making mistakes and things going really, really awry and then learning from it. I wanted to go in prepared and put myself in the best possible position to move forward.

Q. What sort of volumes are you targeting?

I started the graduate program in 2023 and fortunately enough, with the loan book size that the Aussie Prospect has, there’s never any shortage of business or leads coming in and there’s always an oversupply or surplus that needs to be tended to.

I set myself a goal for 2024 where I wanted to settle $50 million. I managed to do that, which is awesome. During the graduate program, which is eight weeks long, I lodged 19 deals.

I think it’s still the record today for most admissions in the graduate program! In my second month as a broker, I settled $4.3 million worth of loans (it would have been $5 million, but the deal that was meant to settle on 30 November rolled over to 1 December).

I’ve set myself a lofty goal of settling $70 million in 2025, which is a huge, huge target! It will require some long hours, some long weeks. But the way that I’m figuring that I’m going to do that is about diversifying the source of business and where it’s coming from.

Q. What do you put your early successes down to?

Every single conversion is potentially an opportunity to generate more leads. It starts at one and then grows from there.

I think it’s a massive credit to the store that we’ve got here and the volume of leads and support that we had at the time and particularly the grad program, getting to workshop every deal with the entire cohort and with my grad manager and making sure that all of my submissions are very neat and tidy, which is something I pride myself on.