5 minute read
Brokerage insight
Top customer service drives growth
A passion for property and an ability to form great relationships with clients has helped Taku Ekanayake build a successful career as a broker after just five years in the industry
IT’S NOT uncommon to hear of mortgage brokers who started out as property investors.
Taku Ekanayake, who set up his own Sydney brokerage, Kin Financial, in 2017, embarked on his career this way. He says his journey started in 2015 when he was building a property investment portfolio.
“My mortgage broker at the time, Michael Xia of Mortgage Channel, had mentored me on my investment journey,” says Ekanayake. cate and build meaningful relationships with my clients,” he says. “I believe broking and business is all about building and maintaining meaningful long-term relationships.”
Ekanayake says his innate passion for property and investing has helped him create such strong relationships with his clients and stakeholders.
During his first 18 months as a mortgage broker, he moved from Sydney to the Gold
“The impact he made on my growth and development in understanding investing, property fundamentals and finance really sparked my own desire and passion to build my own mortgage brokerage and deliver a high level of service based on the guidance Michael had given me.”
Ekanayake says he was fortunate that Xia offered his time to mentor him as he built his brokerage. Prior to setting up Kin Financial, he didn’t have any formal industry experience or qualifications in finance or mortgage broking.
“I had a career in various sales roles in the tech industry. I believe my previous roles in various sales positions helped me communiCoast where Xia lived and worked (at the office of his mentor, Rolf Latham of ASAP Financial) so he could be mentored by Xia. He says the opportunity to be able to watch and learn alongside some of the industry’s best operators was invaluable, and it helped accelerate his development as a broker.
“It was an immersive experience working seven days a week averaging over 80-hour work weeks. We all lived and breathed property and mortgage broking – I liken it to a Silicon Valley of mortgage broking where we were all just hustling to build our respective businesses in a collaborative environment.”
In his first six months of broking, Ekanayake says he leveraged the power of traditional media such as the Sydney Morning Herald, news.com.au, the Australian Financial Review, Domain and 2GB, as well as podcasts.
“I was able to share my investing journey of building my own residential portfolio across multiple nationwide platforms for free … my first 70 to 80 clients which I converted came through these free platforms.”
Ekanayake says most of his initial clients were young professionals who were looking at
WORKING ON THE BUSINESS
Taku Ekanayake says his goals for Kin Finance over the next 12 months include hiring a dedicated post-settlement and compliance officer and an operations manager to help improve workflows and daily operations.
“Currently, there are inefficiencies in our back-end processes which can be improved to enable us to provide a more streamlined approach for our staff and clients,” he says. “Streamlining such bottlenecks will ultimately enable us to write more volume and provide a better customer experience.”
In the next three years, Ekanayake wants to have three to four brokers writing their own loans and bringing in their own leads. “This will allow me to work on the business and not in it.”
purchasing their first or second property.
“I think my story resonated with this demographic. However, over the past couple years, the demographic has expanded as our clients have referred their family and friends.”
By focusing on a high level of customer service, the brokerage now operates on a strong word-of-mouth model, says Ekanayake.
Ekanayake is the sole broker at Kin Financial, which offers home, investment and SMSF loans. He says he chose the name Kin because “our clients are like our extended family”. Also, ‘kin’ means gold, or money, in Japanese, and Ekanayake has Japanese heritage.
Ekanayake employs three support staff – Janine, Mel and Kei – who assist with the dayto-day operations of the brokerage.
“They are invaluable to the business, and they help free up my time so I can focus on building and maintaining relationships with our new and existing clients.
“The goal by the end of this year is to add two new additions to the team – a dedicated staff member for post-settlement and compliance, and an operations manager to assist with workflows and managing backend support.”
Looking back at the last two years, Ekanayake says the market has undergone incredible growth, and Kin Financial’s business has doubled in volume.
“For this current financial year 2022, the business would have settled over $100m.”
Just as the first COVID lockdown hit, the brokerage made the decision to change aggregators to Specialist Finance Group.
“It’s been one of the best business decisions I have made. SFG’s software and support from their team have been invaluable, and we would not have been able to more than double in volume as effectively if it wasn’t for the help of the team at SFG.”
Property market growth has led to big increases in equity for Kin Financial customers, enabling them to refinance and access significant equity to upgrade their homes and/or continue on their investing paths.
“We’ve had an influx of first home buyers; however, our bread and butter has remained investors,” Ekanayake says.
It’s an exciting time for the industry, he adds. When he set up the brokerage in 2017, mortgage brokers were settling about 50% of home loans. “Today, almost 70% of loans are written by mortgage brokers, with the trend continuing to increase.”
Ekanayake says the scrutiny the mortgage industry has been under since the royal commission has only instilled in clients more trust and confidence in brokers.
“However, it’s not a time for us to get complacent, with interest rates increasing and many markets predicted to cool off,” he says. “As a business owner, my goal is to buck the trend and continue to serve more clients and grow volume in a softening market.”
KIN FINANCE AT A GLANCE
Owner: Taku Ekanayake
Location: Market St, Sydney
Year founded: 2017
Services offered: Home loans, investment loans, SMSF loans
Number of employees: 3
