Building an empire

Australian mortgage broker Alex Lambros entered the industry eight years ago with no experience and no contacts, and now manages a team responsible for 40 different real estate offices

Alex Lambros entered the mortgage broking industry eight years ago with no experience and no contacts.

But eight years on and he is managing a team of mortgage brokers who are responsible for 40 different LJ Hooker real estate offices throughout Sydney. Lambros is the director, franchisee and senior lending specialist for LJ Hooker Home Loans Eastern Suburbs.

Lambros said it was a long, hard road building his reputation and finding his feet and his point of difference as a new to industry broker.

“I door knocked with a lot of banks and they kept closing the door in my face [because I had] no experience. Then it was about whom I knew, not what I knew. I met a real estate agent who put me in touch with a mortgage broker and she was kind enough to train me. I did a lot of work for her on a very low income. I did that for about six months while I learnt the ropes, and then started mortgage brokering.

“I stayed with her for about two years and serviced the LJ Hooker network, managing about five offices. What I realised pretty quickly was that I can’t be everywhere, so I really narrowed it down and focussed on two good operators and worked with them, and got some good results for them and myself.”

While having an experienced mortgage broker as a mentor was Lambros’ lifeline as a new broker, he also turned to horizontal industries to round out his knowledge, experience and contacts.

“But there was more to learn, so I partnered up with a financial planning business and started doing the mortgage brokering for them,” he said.

“I got to better understand strategy and structure as opposed to interest rate, which really armed me well for the future.”

Building an empire
After working alongside financial planners to gain an alternate and deeper understanding of the finance industry, Lambros returned to LJ Hooker. However, this time he came back as a franchise owner – the director of LJ Hooker Home Loans Eastern Suburbs.#pb#

“…[W]e started off managing about eight to 10 real estate offices at that time. It was just myself and my two business partners, who were financial planners.  We started having different conversations, not just about rate, but about strategy and structure, wealth creation, and the difference between offset accounts and redraw facilities, which not everyone is really across.

“After many years of door knocking with those real estate agents and convincing them to work with us, which was hard, eventually the tide kind of turned and they were wanting to work with us. They could see we were getting some results for them, and the feedback was well-received from the clients they were sending our way.”

Since then the business has grown rapidly from managing eight to 10 real estate offices, to currently managing around 40 LJ Hooker real estate offices throughout Sydney. Lambros has had to constantly be on a recruitment drive to keep up with growth, but he says there are no plans to start slowing down.

“Recruitment has been tough, but it has also been pretty rewarding when you have got some people that have stayed with you for a number of years and you have seen them grow, just as someone once gave me the opportunity. That has been really enjoyable.

“Now we are sitting at about 11 active brokers with two in training, so we will be at 13 soon and wanting to grow. We will need to get to about 20 to work with the current territory that we are supporting. Once we get there, the territory will grow again and we will recruit again.

“We had to move into this office space because we got to the point in our last office where we were telling brokers ‘sorry you will have to actually work from the office or you have to work from home because we don’t have the room for you’. That was not an ideal conversation so we moved to a bigger place where we can now house everyone.”

But LJ Hooker Home Loans Eastern Suburbs isn’t just about the home loan. Lambros also has a team of financial planners, buyers agents and conveyancers. He has built the true definition of a “one-stop-stop”.

“It is all about understanding the ‘why’ with us: why do you want to do this? What is your idea of your financial freedom? Once we understand that, we can then go into the structuring and the strategy and we can pull in whoever we need – whether it is a financial planner or a buyer’s agent or a conveyancer,” he told said.

“We want to be that business where people don’t have to look anywhere else, and the internal communication is so clear that everything goes well.”#pb#

Currently, there is an entire team of 23 working in the modern, open plan office overlooking the city on Castlereagh Street in Sydney’s CBD.

Supporting growth
Lambros has a team of client service managers dedicated to processing loan applications for brokers. Whilst all new brokers are required to learn how to process their own loan applications at first, Lambros says it is important to have support systems in place for more experienced brokers. He organises this through a unique colour-coding system: red is code for administrative tasks, blue is code for sales tasks and black is code for structure and strategy.

“When a broker ends up doing too much red, they can’t do enough blue and then what ends up happening is they did. Their sales drop because they are doing all this paperwork and they are then back on the treadmill trying to get your results back up,” he told Australian Broker.

“So a broker will get to a certain point where they are doing too much red and that’s when we say they should start handing their paperwork over. They know what to do, so now they can rely on someone fulltime and they can get back to doing more blue.

“That’s how you get a mortgage broker going from settling $30 million in a year to $60 million in a year.”

LJ Hooker Home Loans Eastern Suburbs also supports its new brokers by supplying leads from its real estate partners, helping them build their networks and make a living quicker.

“…[W]hen I bring a broker in here, it is not a sink or swim situation which was kind of given to me. If you join us, we really want you to succeed. We will do everything we can to make you succeed. So recruitment is really critical to us, but it is a give and take.#pb#

“We will give you everything we’ve got, but you’ve also got to give us your time and energy. When [a new broker] come[s] in, we will give them 60 or 70 leads a week and we will say go and connect and book as many meetings as you can. And if you walk away booking four meetings you are doing well, because out of the four, you will hopefully meet three. And out of the three, you will probably lodge one. And if you do one a week, and you do one a week for the next 48 weeks with an average deal size of $500,000, you are not doing too bad. That is how we give them those leads.”

Train hard or go home
A major part of Lambros’ business model is centred on building a solid training program. This involves a company-wide weekly sales meeting, delivered by Lambros personally, but directed by the brokers themselves. Each training session – or sales meeting – will generally cover both product knowledge and skill development.

“I have really increased the focus [on training],” he said.

“In the sales meeting, we generally have a lender come in and talk about what they’re offering. It is also about getting a face-to-face understanding of who everyone is, so then when the broker does actually need their help, they can just pick up the phone because they have already got a bit of a relationship.

“Then at the tail-end of that sales meeting, we would do training for about an hour. We do anything they want. I always ask them every week and they generally throw something at me and I will put it on the list… The next week, we don’t waste time thinking about what we are going to train in, we know what we are going to work on. Whatever they add to the list goes into the next week and the next week.”

As a one-stop-shop broker/planner/buyer’s agent/conveyancer, Lambros will also leverage the varied skillsets in the office when conducting the regular training sessions.

“It is constantly evolving… [W]e will bring in the financial planner and they will talk about SMSF stuff – how to structure the lending, what to look out for, the pitfalls, how to read a play slip, how to read a tax return and how to read company financials. What do these things mean? How do they work together?

“Last training session was bank policies and who’s got the niches. So we listed all the banks we work with and said right, who is good for this and who is good for that?”#pb#

No topic is off-bounds at these training sessions, whether it is small administrative tasks or technical knowledge. Previous sessions so far have included everything from how to conduct yourself in a phone conversation better, how to deal with rejection, and how to structure your day. They have also covered more technical aspects of broking, such as how to process an application, how to structure a submission and when to do your compliance.

Creating a culture focussed on training comes from the top, says Lambros. This is why he, as the director, is heavily involved in both running and attending all training sessions.

“It is about getting their knowledge up and in order to do that, it comes from the top. I need to make sure that I am at the peak of where I need to be in order to give them what they need in order to lift them.

“Some days they might be down and out because they have had a lot of rejection on the phone and it is tough.  And I have got to be there to help them go ‘look, today was a tough day, don’t worry about it. You have got to shake it off; you have got to dust yourself off. Tomorrow you will pick yourself up and go again and it will be alright.’

“There is that and then you just keep adding to their skillset and it is all a part of their training,” Lambros said.