My job is to be your eyes, your ears, be your person. In choosing to use a Mortgage Broker/Agent, you are engaging with a trained and educated professional whose job it is to walk you through the process, make it as smooth as possible and to educate and communicate with you every step of the way. If you are borrowing for the first time, have a unique borrowing situation (such as self-employed), don’t have amazing credit, have gone through a marital breakup, planning to retire soon, or are simply overwhelmed with the options you’ve seen or don’t have the time to do the shopping.

Many people choose to work with Mortgage Brokers/Agents to find that team member that has their best interests in mind, has the connections, has the confidence and is committed to them and their journey. We have access to a multitude of lending options, including several local Credit Unions which are typically available to a select group of mortgage professionals. Our goal is to help would-be borrowers find a lender (traditional, alternative or private) with the best terms, best products and best rates to your financial needs.

Using a Mortgage Broker/Agent will Save Time and money with one-stop shopping. It could take weeks for you to organize appointments with competing mortgage lenders — and we know you’d probably rather spend your time house-hunting! We have access to many options and many lenders. We can quickly narrow down a list of those that suit you best. Our job is to make comparison-shopping fast, easy, and convenient. Instead of applying at the lenders yourself and potentially lowering your credit score, your mortgage broker will do all the legwork for you. Not only can this save you time, but it can also save you money. If your broker finds a lender offering a mortgage with a lower rate, that could mean thousands of dollars in savings over the life of your mortgage. We pay attention to the detail of the products. There is money to be saved with insurance, penalties, and payment privileges too.

Contrary to what some people believe, there’s no charge for our services to our clients on typical residential mortgage transactions. How can we afford to do that? Like many other professional services, such as insurance, mortgage brokers/agents are generally paid a finder’s fee when we introduce trustworthy, dependable customers to a financial institution. These fees are quite standard and nearly industry-wide so that the focus remains on you, the customer. The only time you might have to pay a fee is when working with a private lender or a lender who simple does not pay broker fees, but a broker/agent will tell you in advance of those potential extra costs. Our goal is no surprises.

If you apply at dozens of lenders yourself, not only is it time-consuming, but it can also lead to a lower credit score. Here’s why – each time you apply at a lender, it results in a “hard credit check”. If you do too many credit checks within a relatively short time span, it can lower your credit score. Having too many people pulling credit reports and even constructing your deal can make for a very confusing situation. It’s important to work with someone you trust and allow them to do the work that needs to get done.

There are several “rules of thumb” that you can use to determine your likelihood of success of obtaining a mortgage.

Do you have enough income to service a mortgage and all of your debts and living expenses?

Lenders have ratios that must be met in order to qualify for a mortgage. Typically around the 40% range is where you should be sitting when it comes to how much of your income is used to pay your debts, your rent, your shelter costs. Our job as a Mortgage Broker/Agent is to work through those numbers with you and see where you stand, what your likely to be able to afford in this market.

Do you have prior credit challenges such as a consumer proposal or bankruptcy?

Many lenders have a hard stop when it comes to lending for a mortgage in this situation. Your mortgage broker/agent is here to work with you and your unique situation to see if there are any options or to work with you to plan to get to where you want to be. Through experience, we know the lenders who will make considerations. Knowing which lender does what and when based on our clients circumstance will make the difference between getting a hard no and getting the YES!

Does the location of my home or investment property matter?

The value, location, square footage, rural vs urban, style of home (condo, mobile home, vacation cottage, wood frame, log etc) even heat sources are all things that are taken into consideration in the world of lending. Working with a Mortgage Broker/Agent, all of these are reviewed and the impacts are communicated with you. Whether you are borrowing for a new purchase, renewing, transferring or refinancing your property, we are here to help you understand each step along the way.

A mortgage is a complex transaction. Within a mortgage there are rates, absolutely, but if that rate has penalties tied to it that will cost you should you need or want to break your mortgage early it may be worth it to consider a different product. Some lower rate mortgages come with a “bone fide sales clause” meaning that you can’t get out of your mortgage without selling your property – so this would become an issue if you needed to refinance during your term. Prepayment clauses are also very different from lender to lender. What if you wanted to put extra money towards your mortgage, knowing and fully understanding the terms needs to be almost as important as the rate. Are the penalties a 3 month interest penalty or are they an IRD (Interest Rate Differential)? An IRD can mean 10’s of thousands of dollars. Are there opportunities for cash back, payment forgiveness, rate drops (in the case of preapprovals)? These are some of the things that are almost as important as the rates. Our job as your Mortgage Broker/Agent is to find the package that best suits your needs now, in a few years from now and as a foundation for the future to both save you time and money.

As your team member, our job is to do the math; to compare the options that you qualify for, to see what the immediate, short term and long term benefits might be and in some cases even take the level of strategy and creativity to a whole new level to ensure that your cash flow and your dreams are equally considered.

Closed mortgages can be either fixed or variable – the main difference is that there are penalties to pay off a closed mortgage within the term whereas an open mortgage is exactly that, open to full payment at any time.

The main difference between a variable mortgage and an adjustable mortgage is that your mortgage payment amount remains the same in a variable however the distribution between principle and interest can change within the payment as the Bank of Canada Key Rate changes. With an adjustable rate mortgage, the amount of your total payment will go up and down based on the changes to the prime lending rate.