Find out how the head of Rethink Investing’s broking arm is growing the business and what his top tips are for brokers starting out.
How and why did you become a broker?
My background is in wealth management and I was a financial planner for many years… As a financial planner, I got to look at a lot of things for my clients like super investments and risk but the only thing I could not cover was mortgages. So I decided to get a licence.
This content is available exclusively to
The Adviser premium members.
Why did you join Rethink Financing?
Initially, I was only really covering mortgages for my own clients but… around 2017 [Scott O’Neill, founder of Rethink Investing] started the mortgage broker business himself… he tapped me on the shoulder and said: ‘Hey, do you want to head it up?’.
I thought maybe he'd just got a few deals here and there I could handle, but it started to get full-on, so I had to hire quite quickly!
Initially, we brought on two brokers and an admin staff. From there every year it grew to include more clients, bigger properties, and more documentation. Then we had to recruit more brokers, more admin staff and an operations manager.
Now we've got about 14 brokers, six admin staff, and a couple of other personnel as well. And we just hired an operations manager. But we're looking to bring on even more for 2025.
What do you look for when you're bringing someone into the team?
We want someone that's experienced in terms of residential and looking to push the envelope and go into commercial at a bit more. Or ex-commercial bankers who want to leave the bank and become a broker.
I find hiring very difficult because when you get a resume, it looks fantastic. But until they come in and I can see what they're doing, we can’t tell how much they need to learn.
What kind of loans are you writing?
It's pretty much all investment. We do not do any first-time buyers. The only owner occupiers we have is probably someone who wants to refinance extract equity for investment. I’m very heavily geared towards commercial investors. We don't do anything in Sydney really because yields are lower. Prices come off there for, you know, retail and offices.
Perth is going ‘gangers’ at the moment because the eastern seaboard is just too expensive, lending's too hard. So they go to cheaper markets.
Our clients are hungry; it's always about the next one and the next one.
Rethink Investing is educating the market about commercial property, we are getting more and more clients that want to buy commercial inside their SMSF.
How educated are your clients in investor lending?
Some of the high-net-worth clients we work with already hold five or more investment properties and we don’t need to educate them. But some that are starting out with one or two residential properties might need some advice.
If they’re delving into commercial property we will talk about the different structures and why we're using them from a lending perspective. I always tell them: ‘Speak to your solicitor and accountant to find out the legal and taxation implications but this is why we suggest it from a lending perspective’, and then we go from there.
What are your plans to build the brokerage in 2025?
When I joined in 2017, the sole purpose was really to support Rethink Investing clients and that still is the case.. But we are looking to bring it out to the open market now and service more clients. Now the marketing team is taking over to really drive business for us that's non-ReThink.
We want to use technology and AI more. We are looking at AI to make things easier and create more robust workflows and processes. Automation is a big one. As the process moves along like this conveyor belt, it should automatically issue these tasks and checklists that the next person needs to action. We can use automation to send an email automatically to the client, saving us a lot of time.
We’re using SalesTrekker to build our own workflows and manage residential and commercial workflows, new leads, everything...
We hit our record volumes in September, of about $70 million for the month… our target for next year is about $100 million.
What advice would you give to new brokers?
Always be open to learning; every day there’s something new. Even if you find some things difficult, give them a crack because you will learn a lot and you can carry that through to the next deal… Try to spin it from a negative to a positive.
Find yourself a good mentor to learn from. Maybe join a business that is doing well and see what they’re doing. Join a firm, get your hands dirty and - really - just write a lot of deals!
Find out more about Son Pham’s experience in running a growing brokerage and his top tips for commercial investment lending in The Adviser's Elite Broker podcast episode below:
Make sure you’re subscribed to The Adviser’s bulletin to ensure you never miss a beat and never miss a podcast episode by subscribing to us now on your preferred podcast provider!
