Mortgage broking aggregator Plan New Zealand will be aiming to raise the standards of its member brokers as a response to both an expected slowdown in the housing market and to the emergence of cut-price aggregators in Australia.
"It seems there’s a new aggregator every month now and they’re all trying to vie with each other for business," Ray Hair, national sales manager and trans-Tasman manager for the New Zealand company’s parent, Plan Australia, told the New Zealand company’s annual conference last week.
Plan New Zealand will be putting more effort into training and education.
"We need to maintain the quality of this group going forward," Hair said.
Too many people have seen mortgage broking as simply an opportunity to make easy money. "You can’t stop them, but you can put criteria in place," he said.
"We need to raise the ante and make it harder to become a Plan New Zealand member to maintain standards for you as a group."
Plan will also be working on ways to make its members more productive though developing best practice models and to further improve their loan settlement ratios.
While Plan won’t be setting rigid standards, it will be establishing benchmarks. "Ultimately there will have to be a sanction for people not prepared to meet standards," Hair says.
