Flint co-founder and COO Redom Syed shares what it takes to succeed as a broker and his prediction for homebuying trends this year.
The brokerage you co-managed, Confidence Finance, merged with Sydney-based brokerage Flint earlier this year. Why did you decide to merge?
Confidence Finance achieved a lot and I'm very proud of that. But through that journey, it was really lonely - especially early on.... and then through the journey, through the middle years, there were so many times where I wanted to do something, like invest in marketing or start a podcast (years before I actually started doing it), but I couldn't because I didn't know how to do it. And then I'd feel a little bit overwhelmed as there was so many things I had to do that never got done...
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I think we're moving to a model where getting scale achieves so many benefits and it solves so many problems. And a big reason why we're merging together is because we have the same vision of what the future looks like.
What does it take to succeed as a mortgage broker?
What it takes to be a successful mortgage broker has changed a lot over the past six or seven years. The game is moving towards an attention model. Are you able to get attention? Are you able to get the right attention? And are you able to cultivate that attention to give customers great customer service? And if you can merge the two together, you actually have the great ingredients to be a very successful mortgage broker.
What sort of things do you use AI for?
It runs throughout every part of the business. So [we use it] across our business development and lead generation. I use AI for pretty much all of my content generation and how I frame it together, and for the branding that I use. So in that sense, in our interaction, in our lead generation forms and how we get to know a client, we use a lot of AI. It's embedded through our websites in terms of how we are approaching a conversation. So that was probably the 2024 AI model that everyone was talking about and inputting onto their website.
Going forward, it's going to be [about] using AI throughout different sections of the business to deliver that service faster and of higher quality. So we have access to a lot of client data. That's a lot of doing the same thing over and over again. So that does give us the ingredients to be able to invest in systems and technologies that can allow us to deliver the services that we need at speed.
We've used that [AI] to fill gaps. We've used it to communicate with clients a little bit better. In my role, it's going to be about creating a culture that adopts change and that adopts the reality that things will move quickly.
What goals do you have for Flint?
It's to be the number one independent mortgage broker in Australia. That's the goal. I don't think we'll achieve that this year. I think that is not the realistic goal for this year, but [we want] to be on the pathway towards that and by next year that really is the goal.
We're building a great big house full of amazing mortgage brokers and right now, it's about setting the right foundations. This is the Flint direct model that we're talking about. And the big part of that is setting the slabs with a great credit team and then getting the right people in who are a reflection of what Flint is trying to be.
How do you see lending and homebuying trends changing this year?
If you look at the data as to who is making up the lending [landscape], investor lending has shot up in 2024 and we've definitely felt that.
I think that gives you a little bit of a signal though… It's kind of giving us a little bit of a sense as to what is going to happen this year. I feel like home buying momentum is going to increase and we may be underestimating a level of increase as well.
This is a little bit of a crystal ball for 2025 but momentum makes a difference in our markets and there could be a momentum change. I'm not so sure one rate cut would do it though.
What advice would you give to new brokers?
For me it would be about embracing failure. My 2024 was so much [about] failure... The first nine months [of making social media content for brokers] was just me doing all the wrong things on video.
I constantly embrace failure because it is disheartening. You do it for months and you spend hours putting a video together and no one watches it or you get 100 views and it leads to no visible movement in whatever you're trying to achieve. So embrace failure. Don't give up.
Tune in to hear more!
Find out more about how Sydney-based brokerage Flint recently reshaped its ownership structure and leadership team following a merger with brokerage Confidence Finance on the Elite Broker podcast episode, ‘How these elite brokers have merged to spark success at Flint’ here:
