Len 00:02
Welcome. My name is Len Lane, and I am the founder and president of Brokers for Life Inc., and we are Dominion Lending Centers in Western Canada. The topic of our podcast will be about what we consider to be Real Life Mortgage Solutions.
So this episode is called, Why Did You Want to Be a Mortgage Broker? I get asked that question more and more times than I can imagine over the last 20 years, only because people who knew me previously knew that I had sold new homes for the better part of a decade, I guess, and had done quite well at it as well. But there was one thing that I always thought was the only other thing that I would do with real estate or new homes, or any kind of real estate side, was that I wanted to do mortgages.
I had seen a lot of people over the years, mostly bank specialists, who would come to my door looking for business on a regular basis. I ended up working with just two or three of them over the years, and they had been quite successful, but they really weren’t that sharp for people. Some of them are probably listening, going, “Son of a bitch, what do you mean not that sharp?” Well, when I was selling new homes, we were selling starter-level product—half-duplexes, single-family, what they called RPL in Edmonton—it’s a smaller home with maybe a garage in the back if the lot was big enough.
But it was the simple fact that one of them taught me, basically, how to figure out if someone qualified for a mortgage. I didn’t realize it till years later, and he owes me a lot of money, because basically what I did was I would get a pay stub, I would do the simple math of figuring out if 42% and 35% were part of it, you know, some idea of what they had for debt. He gave me a little sheet to fill out, and I would fill it out with their name and address and all of that good contact information. Then I would send that to him with the actual contract and the floor plan. So I was doing most of the work already, just didn’t realize until years later, when I took the course, that that was part of what we figure out today still. We just do it in a system where you’re plugged in, and the calculator is built into pretty much every platform.
I jokingly told some people a while ago at the Alberta Real Estate School graduation that, you know, congratulations, you got 70% on the course, or at least they told you you passed. I guess they don’t tell you what the score is these days. That $100-and-some-dollar calculator that you bought—you can now throw that in the bin, because that’s built into pretty much everything that we do every day. It’s not something that you actually physically have to calculate. They should teach more about the actual platforms and how they work, I guess. But that’s not their job. That’s our job, to teach people that.
But I also knew one thing: I had worked for a lot of people over the years, helped them, inadvertently built their business. I sold a lot of homes. I was a sales manager, and I helped train new people and helped build that business for them, that way as well. I was a general manager, and that, in one scenario, was an okay job, but when it’s a family-run business, you’re never going to own it. And then the second one was for a huge corporation, which I now own shares in because I couldn’t while I was working there, but that was probably the worst job as a general manager that I ever had.
So housing kind of lost its taste for me. Real estate—becoming a real estate agent—would have been something along the same lines of working every weekend, working every evening, not really having a life, not only being away for maybe two weeks at a time if you wanted to be. So there was no real freedom in me moving from new home sales to being a real estate agent. I probably would have done quite well at it regardless, but again, there was something missing in it.

Len 4:09
My why was this: I wanted to build a business, to have a business that was my own. Simple as that. I’d been looking for it for years. We always had a side gig, as they call it these days. I always had another business on the go, especially when I sold new homes, because you didn’t start in the show home till three o’clock in the afternoon. So you had all morning and part of the afternoon, to do other things. And there was a cleaning supply business, or we did boiler treatment, because I had some background in that long before homes. There was always something out there that I was striving to get to a point where I could work for myself.
So when I looked at mortgages, it checked a lot of boxes for me. There’s a definite advantage to helping people. It’s an ongoing market when you start to understand the business—we’re not just out there looking for purchases and sales. We are out there actually looking at all those other possibilities—refinancing, switching, doing all of that kind of stuff. Private lending was big in the early 2000s when I got started and died out a little bit and changed over the years, but there was more opportunity here than I could imagine compared to just selling houses.
Selling houses is… you sell one house, then another, then another. Real estate was obviously good for a lot of people, but the actual vision of being the broker and the owner, which was my goal when I started in this business, wasn’t as easy to obtain properly in real estate as it was in mortgages in that timeframe. Anyway, when I looked at mortgages, obviously, the ongoing opportunities, a business where you had no receivables—basically, you completed your mortgage, people got paid, banks paid you, or however that worked, right?
There were limited payables. If I didn’t want to advertise and spend that money, I didn’t. I did spend a lot of time building a business very quickly in the first three or four years to get to a point where I knew that after two years—well, I knew when I started that my goal was in two years or less, or more, I guess, between two and three years—to actually become the broker-owner, and that’s what I did.
So maybe I started a little later in life than a lot of people have, but that was my goal. And whether that was just me and myself doing it as a broker, I didn’t care. I didn’t envision it until I actually started to see that when we started the brokerage, there was a dozen people who came with us from TMG. So we walked into the AMBA conference in Red Deer, which they should hold there more often, and we walked into the conference as Verico Brokers for Life.
So two and a half years, 30 months, I’d already made a million dollars in commission. The vision was to be the broker, to be self-employed, and to help people build businesses of their own. And we’ve done that over the years. We have some very successful people that have made very good mid–six-figure incomes, and some who branched off and started their own brokerages. So it’s always having a why.
Why did I do this? I wanted to be self-employed, simple as that. I wanted to build a business for myself. Regardless of how you think about it, I guess you’re always building it for someone else. The people were there to help me do that, and that is something that is missing in just about 99% of the industries out there.
I told you today that I was going to start to build houses when I came out of the new home industry. It was a possibility, but I had built so much time building someone else’s. I was already a Certified Master Builder, which really means I’ve never actually swung a hammer, but I did have the 18 courses, I think it was, that they put you through. That education taught us about business, taught us about building codes, taught us about construction, to the point where it was more of an engineer’s view of it than an actual hands-on plumber, carpenter, or framer would have of the industry.
It’s finding your why. I ask people all the time when they come to work for me, “Why mortgages?” The answer varies from, “I saw someone else do this, and they did such a poor job that I figured I could do better.”

Len 08:55
That’s a common one. I have very seldom ever had someone say, “Look, I’m looking to build a business for myself,” because that is really what you should be thinking—why am I doing mortgages?
So when you start to think about mortgages and the business that it is, there are a couple of different ways businesses are built. And you’ve got to think about this as an agent: What is it that you want to be when you become a mortgage broker?
Do you want to be one of these three?
There are brokerages where the broker-owner runs the whole operation. He hires people who are licensed to be underwriters, if you like, and so you work in an office or you work remotely, but you get paid a salary, and then possibly you get paid a portion of commissions if you hit certain volume levels for different types of lenders. That one has lots of great examples. And don’t get me wrong, there are huge businesses built that way. True North, you’ve probably heard of that one if you’re in Western Canada at least. It’s a multi-billion-dollar business, set up to be somewhat bank-like, but not exactly a bank, because they still deal with a multitude of lenders that give options to clients.

The second type is still a mortgage brokerage, but it’s done differently. There aren’t employees, but there are a lot of individual agents whose job is to feed the underwriting center. While they have licenses and are educated to a degree, they don’t know the lender side as well as someone who is a trained frontline underwriter. I see it over and over again. It’s a successful model for some, where agents are basically mortgage couriers. So they go out to find a deal. They bring the deal in, basically turn it over to an underwriter, who does all of the other stuff. They tell them what paperwork they’re going to need. So they go back and they get that, they come back with all of that. And then underwriter does all the business with the lender. The lender then sends the paperwork back to that underwriter, that underwriter packages all up, slap the MPP on top, sends it out and sends the agent back out to the client and has them sign whatever they’ve been told to sign. Right? So I have an issue with some of that, and I’m sure I’m going to get emails and letters emails anyway. But you know, seeing that model in the industry, I think it does a disservice to us, who are actual hands on frontline underwriting brokers, because that agent has probably a core basic knowledge of what he or she is doing, and not necessarily serving the client correctly. The brokerage, in the end, owns that client because you didn’t really build a relationship. You just went back and forth with paperwork. They’ll think you’re a great courier, and in the end, you’re not building a business for yourself.
So couple of different models there. One is an actual storefront kind of model. The other one is, is one where you have 20 people running around, or 30 people, or 40 people running around, you know, finding business for you and you as the broker and brokerage, you keep that client and it doesn’t build a business for the person actually doing the legwork, if you want to call it that.

Len 13:08
So third type is what I set out to build, and that was one where you actually train people to be frontline underwriters. I use that word, and I don’t use it lightly, because I believe that every time one of my agents, a Brokers For Life agent, or someone trained by Brokers For Life, talks to a client, they are knowledgeable about what they’re doing, because we spend hundreds of hours every year in live trainings, weekly trainings, one on one, trainings with mentors to teach people how to be a frontline underwriter. Frontline underwriter is as simple as this. It’s someone who actually knows what they’re doing when they get to the client. They take the application, they can go through that interview, they process and make the client aware of what documents they need and why they need them, as well as… they deal with the lender directly. Now, by doing that, you’re building two relationships. You’re building a relationship with your client, and you’re building a relationship with the lenders, which are huge partners for us. We are nothing without them, and you learn to do a good job with them, so that you have some credibility, and things roll smoothly for you on that lender side as well.
So it’s something that we’ve strived to do here at Brokers For Life, and that is to create frontline underwriter. Simple as that, we’re going to teach you as much as we can about everything there is to know about mortgages. You’ll never know it all. Trust me, I learn new stuff every month, which is why I’m still here 20 years later, and wondering about what is the next change going to be? Trying to be ahead of that, trying to be… talking more about private lending this year. So our whole fall training is going to be about private lending and fraud awareness, which we do twice a year anyway, but there’s a constant learning process that never actually ends. And that is one of the beauties of what we do as well… I think, in my years in the home building industry, there was a point where it’s a box on a box. There’s only so much you can do with a box on a box… put the boxes beside each other and on top, but in the end, that’s what home building is, right? So put a box on a box on a concrete box in the ground. So it came to a point where there was nothing more to learn… that was going to enhance the rest of my life. Let’s put it that way. Mortgage brokering did that. So if I had a why, the why was that I wanted to work for myself. I wanted the freedom that mortgage brokering allows as well. I didn’t want to have to go to a show home. I didn’t want to have to pick up people and drive them around the city. I wanted to be able to work from Mexico, which we’ve done on a yearly basis… just about. I wanted to be in Europe visiting grandkids, and even though you’re seven or eight hours off, it’s still workable. We have agents who have worked from halfway around the world because there were 12 hours ahead. But what they did was they just flipped their day so that, if they were in India working and they were able to maintain it, it was a different cycle for them on their end to work with the hours that were here in Canada. So think about your why? Why would you want to be a mortgage broker? Why are you a mortgage broker? And what type of mortgage broker did you want to be? If you’re not looking to build a business and you just want a job where somebody’s going to pay you, you’ll make a living. But I can tell you right now that our average agent last year averaged $125,000 in gross income and growth commission. So there aren’t 20 nine-to-five jobs that are going to give you that. You might make it at the bank, but you’re gonna have to do a lot of business, trust me, at 30 dips, as opposed to 110.

Len 17:24
So, think about it. If you’re going to join this industry, find a why. If you’re just looking to have a change of scenery, it might work out. If you’re looking to build a business, there’s a way to do that, and it’s by being that frontline underwriter, by building a business of clients that can be put into a CRM program that can run and be part of what you’re doing for the next 20 years. Maybe you don’t do this for 20 years. I didn’t know if I was going to do it for 20 years. It looks like I may do it for more than that. But that’s an option or choice that you can make. If you started a little younger than me, you won’t have to maybe do it as long as I have, but it’s a thriving industry, and being a frontline underwriter and knowing what you’re doing will build you a better business than being maybe a courier or definitely not working directly for another underwriter, for somebody who has a storefront, because that’s their business, and you just become an employee. So, anyways, find your why.

Len 18:31
Thanks for listening today. I hope you found the information that we provided to be useful in your mortgage journey. And remember, you can always find our associates at www.brokersforlife.ca/associates. Have a great day.