The ABCs of Mortgages and Buyers Agents: Understanding the Basics

The ABCs of Mortgages and Buyers Agents: Understanding the Basics

Welcome to the "Property and Lending Show", where we unravel the mysteries of the real estate world! In this episode, join your host, Kyrillos Mansour (Buyers Agent), alongside Fadi and Mark from Power Loans, as we dive deep into "The ABCs of Mortgages and Buyers Agents: Understanding the Basics."

🏡 What's Inside:

Insights from Experts: Kyrillos Mansour, Fadi, and Mark share their wealth of knowledge on mortgages and the role of buyers agents.

Why Use a Mortgage Broker: Discover the benefits of working with mortgage brokers from Power Loans and how they can streamline your home financing journey.

Buyers Agents Unveiled: Kyrillos from First Brick Property Buyers Agency explains the crucial role of buyers agents, why they're essential, and how they can guide you through the property market.

🚀 Key Takeaways:

Unlock the fundamentals of mortgages and buyers agents.
Learn how to make informed decisions in your real estate endeavors.
Gain exclusive tips from industry professionals at Power Loans.

🎙️ About the Hosts:
Get In touch with the Mark, Fadi, Kyrillos Mansour (KM) and Peter
Details below

Mark@powerloans.com.au

Fadi@powerloans.com.au

Peter@powerloans.com.au

hello@firstbrick.com.au

Instagram Handles:
@firstbrickproperty 
@markkilada   
@powerloans  
@fershi.pt
@peterpowerloans 

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👉 Join the Conversation:
We want to hear from you! Share your thoughts in the comments below and let us know what real estate topics you'd like us to cover in future episodes.

🎉 Thank you for tuning in!

Transcript

Kyrillos Mansour (KM): 0:12

Hello and welcome back to another episode on the property and lending podcast. Joined with me today. As always, Ferdi and Mark from power loans. And usually I grill mark a little bit at the start, but today we're going to change it a little bit. We're going to go to Ferdi because if you're watching on YouTube or if you're seeing one of these snippets, you'll see Ferdi looks bit different today. He looks a bit cleaner and clearer, and he's always had a better, but there's something different. So we're going to cross to Ferdi and ask, why do you look? I wouldn't call it HSD yet, but you kind of look better. What's going on with your camera?

Fadi Yousef: 0:54

I've been working out more, man. Two more sessions a day. It came down to removing that plastic slip off the camera, which I thought was there to protect it. So I do look better. So I'll take it.

Kyrillos Mansour (KM): 1:14

So Ferdy sent a message in our WhatsApp and said, hey, guys, I just realized I've had the plastic cover on top of my camera the last 300 weeks that we've been recording. That's why I always look like I'm pixelated. I should have read the instructions one by one. We're getting better. We're getting better. Next week, Fetty will. His microphone will work.

Fadi Yousef: 1:43

Well, it's not working now.

Kyrillos Mansour (KM): 1:44

No, it is. Don't stress. Don't press any buttons. Anyway, we'll get into the show. So last couple episodes have been pretty intense, interest rates, inflation forecasts, whatnot. And so we thought we could continue that trend or we could just bring it down a notch and actually go back to basics, because we do get a lot of new listeners. And we actually had one person message us. Message me. Anyway, this week mentioning how the podcast is really helping him. He's just started with our podcast, so we do get a lot of new listeners. So if they're just listening to the latest episodes, it's pretty intense. So we'll bring it back down. It's a Friday today. It's a bit hot. So we'll bring it back to basics and we'll just, I guess, discuss what the roles of a mortgage broker and a buyer's agent is. What are the benefits of using these services as opposed to the alternative options and whatnot? So I guess we'll start with brokers. And I'll start with Mark, if you can, I guess, define what is a mortgage broker's role and what are the alternatives? And then some potential benefits to using a broker as opposed to whatever the alternative is.

Mark Kilada: 3:10

Yeah. Okay, so what is a broker? A broker is someone that is able to organize the finance for you when you come to purchase, whether it's residential, commercial properties, or it's a car, or it's a business, or if you need to borrow money for whatever purpose, you need someone there to mediate the process. And that's what a broker does. Customers can choose to go directly to their local bank, to their branches, can call a random bank, can call us. Independent brokers can also call private banks as well. Like private lending is a whole different thing. So there's a lot of options for clients, and that's why we are the best option, because we offer all of these options to clients with one phone call. So when a customer comes to us and we understand their financial position and we understand what they're looking at buying and their current income and all that sort of stuff, we can figure out which bank exactly suits them the most to achieve their objectives. For most people that are looking to buy a property, they might want to go to figure out, how much can I borrow? What's the maximum? Maybe they want to buy the maximum, maybe they want the cheapest rate. Maybe they want a particular structure, whether it's buying in a trust or company or anything like that. So everyone has a different objective. We have options for everyone to go to, versus going directly to a bank who may not offer that. I called a bank today for a customer looking to buy in a trust, which is fairly normal, it's not like a very strange structure to buy in. It's quite ordinary. We do it every day. There are a lot of banks that accept it. I called one of the second tier lenders today and they said that's not an acceptable borrower for them. So you cannot pull a trust application through to this particular bank. So if you were to call them and say, I want to buy in a trust, they would tell you, that's impossible, we don't do that. So you'd be wasting your time calling around banks. So with one phone call to us or email, whatever it is, we sort out the best option for clients, saving them time. They never need to wait in a line at the branch if they have time to go between 11:00 a.m.

And 01: 5:15

00 p.m. When the branch hours are very convenient for everyone working nine to five. You never need to wait on hold and you won't have Fetty and I know this too well with the people at the bank taking about half a year off in annual leave and getting those automatic responses saying, sorry, I'm on leave from this day to this day. Call me outside of this time. Knowing how sensitive settlements can be with deadlines and that sort of thing, we pride ourselves on always being there for our clients. Whereas when you're going to a bank, you're just a number. There's 100 people that walk in every day. So your personal circumstances are looked after more if you come to an individual broker that has many credit policies with many different banks or many calculators to choose from.

Kyrillos Mansour (KM): 5:56

Amazing. Ferri, do you have anything to add to what mark was saying in regards to what you do, your scope or benefits to using your services?

Fadi Yousef: 6:07

I think Mark covered it pretty well, just from a personal point of view. I love what we do or just what brokers do in general, man, because one thing that Mark said is that we've always got the time.

Our day definitely does not end at 05: 6:18

00 I think you guys already know my day starts from about maybe 5530 and it can go into the night, man. I get a lot of people, a lot of customers calling. We're sorry to call you after hours. I'm like, what are you sorry for? This is why we're here. So like Mark said, we actually pride ourselves on our customer service. We're always here for the customer. We're here to answer questions at any time. And if we're not able to contact you or pick up your call or respond to your email straight away, you would definitely hear back from us within the same day, if anything, within 2 hours. The biggest advantage, again, Mark touched on was basically, we've got that many options out there. So if you were to, it'd be pretty annoying to walk into each lender or each branch to try and see if you fit their policy or if you fit their borrowing capacity, you might go into one of the lenders and they give you a certain amount that you can borrow. But deep down you wanted to borrow just a little bit more. You've got those options out there with other lenders. As we all know, each lender has their own sort of borrowing capacity and you're able to borrow more or less with other specific lenders. I think that's the biggest advantage for brokers, that you don't really hit a brick wall. You're not really left with just one options. You're actually left with quite a number of options. So that's why I've always said, man, whether you come through to power loans or just to go to a broker in general, they're just going to be able to help you out a lot more and look out for your best interest as well. And the communication part is probably our biggest thing. I think that's what we pride on ourselves the most, is that we're always there for our customers. I've taken phone calls at 1157 at night on a Saturday night. It may have annoyed the misses, but I'm still taking that phone call because we're here to look after our customers and we're here to comfort them. Because sometimes it is stressful to purchase your first property. It is stressful to purchase under a trust your first time in the market. We always like to put our customers at ease. I think that's our biggest advantage, is that we're actually there for our customers. Twenty four seven. And plus, our customers know where we live. So we either pick up those phone calls or they knock on our doors.

Kyrillos Mansour (KM): 8:20

Yeah, for sure. And I think as someone that uses a broker and not being a broker, for me, one thing is, I guess people might not know this. People might assume that all the banks will give you the same thing, which is obviously not true. Right? If you're not in the industry or if you're not purchasing properties often, you might think, okay, I have this much in savings. Bank A, B and C are always just going to give me the same option. But every lender has different criteria, has different appetite. It's all different. So going through a broker, you guys obviously speak to everyone, as you both mentioned on the behalf of the client, Evan, you also give that conversation behind it as to what these options mean. Because at the end of the day, if you go to Bank A, Bank A is going to tell you that bank A's product is the best and there's no other option. Right? This is what we have, and this is the best thing for you. Whereas if you go to a broker, you see yourselves, you're going to tell me, okay, bank A's options this, Bank B's options this, bank C's options this. And these are actually the differences. And because Tom might look at the top line and just say, okay, different borrowing, okay, bank A is going to give me 500 grand. Bank B, 550. Bank C, 520. And so I'll just be like, I'll go to the one with the most. But you tell me there's all these fees, there's these features, so you'll be able to actually explain that. And just the idea of going into 20 different lenders and doing that 20 times. What a headache. Why not have a personal service that's personalized to yourself? Someone that's going to do all the hard work for you and you just got to hang out in the background. Mark, what's the process for? I know we've probably mentioned this a few times on this show, but what does a client or a potential customer need to communicate with you or give you? What work do they need to put in with a broker as opposed to if they were to go to every bank themselves? Besides that conversation with the bank?

Mark Kilada: 10:37

Yeah, it's virtually the same. Like the documents that we collect from the clients are the documents that the application requires. So if we're going to a particular bank, that particular bank is going to have a checklist of items that we need to send them and those are the documents that we collect from our clients. If they go to the bank, they'll have the same checklist there. It's funny because people think going to their local bank, it's easier because they already have my account. If the bank already has your accounts and has access to see your transactions, they may start questioning a whole bunch of random transactions for one off purchases, whether it's furniture or whatever it is. When you come to us and we have extensive conversations with our customers about their living expenses and about everything else, we understand the customers expenses and their financial position in general. And now when we submit applications, a lot of banks don't actually request us to send them the living expenses. We self declare their living expenses based on us having extensive conversation with the client, us going through their statement as well and verifying everything. If you have any questions, obviously ask them. So it actually removes a lot of questions. Sometimes the bank, like they're just doing their due diligence as we are as well because we ask the same questions to the customers as well. But yeah, coming to us, it's the same as going to the bank in terms of the documents we collect. So there's no differences there. I'll tell you a funny story about the banks definitely not offering the same thing. So I had a medico client looking at buying at 95% LBR, meaning he's putting 5% down deposit. He's paying stamp duty because he was buying an investment property and the bank was going to fund 95% of the purchase. A few days before settlement, solicitor, which is normal protocol, sends them an email saying, hey, the remaining funds to complete your purchase, meaning your 5% deposit plus damper, they tell you how much it is and you need to put it into a certain account which the bank will use on settlement day. So she goes to him, you need x amount of dollars, let's call it 50 grand. That was more than his daily limit. So he went directly to his bank to make that transfer because I'll do it on the spot for him to the bank that he needs. And when he went there, there was a broker sitting in the room that heard him say, I'm going to transfer 50 grand. They said, oh, what's that for? And he said, I've got a settlement next week. So the broker quickly came out, may have been the biggest bank of Australia, maybe. And then he came out and he said, oh, you're getting a home loan. He's like, yeah, I'm getting a home loan.

Fadi Yousef: 13:17

When?

Mark Kilada: 13:17

Settlement next week. Tell me about it. And the guy's like, yes, I only needed 5% deposit. My broker was able to get that for me. I just paid 5% deposit and steam treating because I'm a doctor. And the guy goes to him, no, that's impossible. And then he's like, it's already approved, like, settlements next week. He's like, no bank does that. And he's like, I can show you the approval if you like. The settlement is next week. It's done. What do you mean? Can't happen? So when you go to the bank, they know one set of credit policies. They know one calculator. They know their bank's appetite when it comes to rates. They don't know anything else. They don't work anywhere else. We get updates on credit policies with all the different banks, as if we work internally with them. We have internal contacts with every single one of these banks as well. So, yeah, when you go into a bank, they definitely have one set of guidelines that they abide by, because that's what's been given to them. And there's very little wiggle room when you come to a broker. There's a lot more options and a lot of different credit policies. So I just thought I'd mention that story to show that you're really pigeonholing yourself if you do go to a bank.

Kyrillos Mansour (KM): 14:28

Yeah, I might add to that story, actually. I was literally on the phone yesterday to someone and they said, can you recommend a broker? And I said, yes, of course. We send all our work to power loans. And he said to me, yeah, you always say power loans, good. What's the difference? Don't all brokers do the same thing? And I might ask you guys to elaborate on that as well. But my story here was, I said to like, ferdi has personally done my own stuff and everyone is different, right? I've got a company, I have a trust, I have my personal name, I've got assets in different things. I'm a bit complicated. There's so many things going on, and some banks will say, yeah, it's not possible. And if I speak to the banks directly, it's just not going to happen. Even sometimes Teddy will tell me it's not going to happen. And I was telling know, make it work. And literally, they will go and negotiate with these banks and try and get an outcome and get something for you. And so that's something that you cannot like as an individual going up to a banker, like Mark's story where the fellow said, it can't be done, well, it can be done. Someone else knows something that you don't know. But the benefit of these brokers, obviously, and a good broker is knowing all the different options that all these different banks have. Whereas that one guy at the bank knew what he knew and that's it. So he didn't have any of those connections. He couldn't speak to anyone, he couldn't do anything about it, because he only works with that product and he can't change it. Whereas obviously, Ferdie and Mark brokers in general will have more option. But a good broker will be able to negotiate and find you the best options. And I guess I'll go back to Ferdi to see if there's anything else you wanted to add to that. But I think that's a huge point, is that they're always looking for different solutions for you. Another point, that there is a difference between good brokers and bad brokers. And a good broker is going to look at your scenario holistically. They're not just going to look at this deal. And that's a huge thing. Why we love personally, like, our clients go straight to power loans, because power loans, these fertie, Mark, they obviously know our clients are usually not buying one property. They're buying multiple properties. They're looking to build a portfolio. So we're building a portfolio. As I think Mark mentioned on the show, property is a game of finance. And it's completely true. If you can get your finances in order and sorted for the long term, you'll be able to borrow multiple times and continue to purchase. And so whether that means different structures or different interest or variables, or variable versus fixed or interest only versus PNI or whatever it is, these guys will look at your scenario holistically and say, okay, you're here, you want to buy two or three more. Well, if we do this, we need some sort of cash. We need a cash flow to be higher so that we can service the next ones or whatnot. And they will forward forecast and we'll obviously give them some scenarios and they will forecast and they'll be able to help you structure to make sure that you don't get capped. Because so many people, 90% of all people that buy or 90% of all investors never get passed to properties. And usually it's not because they don't have growth or anything, it's because they can't get funding from a bank usually, and that's because of poor planning, poor strategy from their own end and from financing. So massive reason we love using brokers and whatnot. I'll just ask Betty as well, if there's anything else you wanted to add to that or any last things before we move on.

Fadi Yousef: 18:24

No, we pretty much added, I think. I guess one thing to keep in mind, if you are going down the route of not wanting to go for a broker and you want to go directly to a bank, and you're going to see a couple of banks to see if you fit their policy, always be mindful of when you're speaking to the broker inside the branch. Don't have him lodge anything because every time you were to lodge or even inquire, it does go against your credit report. And we have seen it before with customers where they've visited a couple of lenders, whether it's through car finance, whether it's for home loans, and that can definitely affect your credit report with those amount of inquiries. I think the rule of thumb is between five to six inquiries every six months. Anything other than that kind of gives your credit report more of a hit and it lowers it down as well. I guess I'm going to share a little story in regards to. We love feedback from our customers as well. I had a guarantor loan yesterday, and I think everyone on here understands that every guarantor loan we've pretty much done hasn't been the smoothest because we're trying to get two banks to communicate with each other, which is not the easiest thing to do. And these customers actually had a guarantor loan previously. The reason why they were eligible for the guarantor loan again is because they sold that property. And once settlement happened, they were actually quite surprised, like, oh, so there's nothing else for us to do. I'm like, no, it's actually settled. And what I loved about it. This was such a seamless process. Last time we did it, we did it directly through the bank. We didn't feel like we were educated enough in regards to what we're looking forward to. How's everything set up? But that's one thing that I guess mark and I, or power loans in general, does, is that you said hit the nail on the head cam. It's more of a holistic point of view. We're not here just to write the home loan that you're coming to us with. We want to know where your long term goals are because we get a lot of clients coming through asking. We want to borrow the maximum borrowing capacity so you can buy a property with. Our first question is why? What's your next five to ten years looking like? Are you looking to get married? Are you looking to go on a few holidays? Are you looking to buy a boat or a car in the next couple of years? Are you looking to start having children? Because if you were to maximize your borrowing capacity from the first one or from the get go, not understanding how it's going to affect your future or long term goals. Like you said, people get stuck at the one or two properties with fast. We look at more of a holistic point of view, where we want to make sure that all your goals, that you've told us all your short term and long term goals are going to be met, and we want to make sure that we put you in the best position to get there.

Kyrillos Mansour (KM): 20:54

Yeah. Beautiful. I'm not sure if there's anything else you guys want to add to that.

Fadi Yousef: 21:05

To lead on to your. I guess to understand more of a buyer's agent. Before you start, I was going to say that the reason why a lot of our customers is like, so why should we go for a buyer's agency? Which is what you're going to explain. But what I love about what first brick does and what you do is that, again, you come more from a holistic point of view, where it just pretty much integrates with what we want to do for our customers, look for what's best for them. It's not a transaction for you. It's always looking after the customer to make sure they get past that two, three, four properties, whatever their goals are. And that's something that our customers, a lot of the feedback that's coming back as well, saying that they're thankful you put them in a better position, you've purchased properties that are less than market value. We always go back to that barbecue on the weekends when people meet up. It's always mentioned. It's always mentioned at the barbecues.

Mark Kilada: 21:55

I was able to pick up a.

Fadi Yousef: 21:56

Property goes off market. I didn't have to go to auction. I wasn't competing with any other sort of buyers. Km pretty much did all the legwork and we just had to sign on the dotted line. And that's what we'd love to hear.

Kyrillos Mansour (KM): 22:10

Thank you for that. Nice segue. I guess I'll explain what a buyer's agent is and what we do and if you guys have any questions, maybe I didn't cover something that we know, otherwise we'll wrap it up. So a buyer's agent, if you've never heard the term or if you've just heard of it, not too sure what it is. A buyer's agent is essentially the opposite of a sales agent, a real estate agent. So real estate sales agent's job is to sell property and they work for the seller. They're very common, they've been around forever. Everyone knows what a real estate agent is. A buyer's agent is the opposite. So what we do is we represent buyers in the market. So someone looking to purchase property, we will help them, we take care of them, we represent them. And just alone on the fact that we do that is really important that we represent buyers, because in this country there hasn't really been a buyer's representative for a long time. Buyers agency in Australia is fairly mean. Our business, we've been around for five years. I think the concept in the countries has been around for only like seven years. So it's not very widely known yet. It's still new. It's obviously becoming more and more popular and more common every day, but it's still very small compared to, for example, real estate agents. I think in the country there's only a few thousand buyer's agents in the entire country compared to 100,000 real estate agents. So it's a very small proportion. But buyer's agency as a concept is not new because actually in the US and Canada, almost, I think almost 90% or 85 or 90% of all transactions occur through a buyer's agent. So it's a very common concept outside of this country. But in Australia it's fairly new, but there are a lot of benefits and there's obviously a bit more to what we do than just represent the buyer. So in more detail, what we do when we meet up with a client, the first thing we do is we have a conversation similar to what Mark mentioned. What they do is they sit and chat, and that's a very important conversation. And we need to know what you want to achieve, where you want to go, and where you are now. And we always kind of compare this part to using a navigator or Google Maps and saying, okay, where are we now? Where do we want to go and how are we going to get there? So we're planning out that strategy on how we're going to get to your end destination. And along that route, there may be some roadblocks and car accidents and whatnot. And that route might change, but we're still going to the final destination. So we're working backwards. So we got to understand why you want to buy property. Firstly, because that will change everything. And everything we do is very personalized to a person's situation. So what I mean is, if daddy wants to buy one property, then use that property to buy his dream home, and that's it. Then that's going to change how we do the rest of our steps, which we'll explain. And for example, if we were speaking to Mark, and Mark said he wants to become a property mogul and build an empire of six or seven, which he already got 20, so seven is like, whatever, but if he wants to buy six or seven properties and have a portfolio, that's going to change what we're doing our next step as well. So first steps is obviously understanding the clients needs. Again, like we mentioned with the loans, it's being holistic and understanding what's the full picture and not just the next purchase. Because if you get one purchase, and it's not in context to the whole scenario, that one purchase can inhibit purchasing more properties if that's what you want to do. Once we've had that conversation and we know what's happening and where we want to get to, then we start doing our next step, which is running a data analysis across the entire country. So this is a data analysis that I do manually myself. We lost Eddie. I was confused because he was smiling for a long time. I thought maybe he froze. If he jumps back in, I'll let him in. But anyway, we run this data analysis, and it's a manual process that I do myself. And not all buyer's agencies do this. So a buyer's agent just has a general concept, someone that represents the buyer and helps them purchase property. What we do is we're very data driven. We only work with investors, really. And so we do this data analysis across all of Australia, where we actually look at every suburb in the country. There's around 15,000 suburbs in Australia. And we're looking at all of them from a data perspective and we're trying to work out which locations, which suburbs are the best suburbs for your specific needs. So again, if Mark wanted to purchase multiple properties and he had a certain income and he needed a certain cash flow so he can continue to service, we would be looking for certain metrics in the data to find the perfect location for Mark. Now, Mark and Fetty could have the exact same budgets, but with different goals. So the different goals means we need different results. And so those different results going to end up putting us in two different parts of the country. This takes us like a week, seven to ten days just running data analysis. And this is the biggest part of our job and it's the most fundamental part because as you've also probably heard on this show, location, location, location is a saying that's very common. And it's a saying because it's true. And we say 85% of a property's value comes from its location. So we spend a lot of time working on this data analysis to get the right location, because if we get this right, everything else almost doesn't matter. If you buy the worst property with the worst land in the best area, you're still going to make money, as opposed to the best house in the best land in the worst area, you won't make money there, you might actually lose money. So we spend a lot of time getting the right location. And this part makes me think every, it makes me really curious about everyone else out there who's just guessing because we spend so much time just getting this part right. And then you hear these stories at the barbecue. Oh, yeah, I just bought a property. Oh, yeah? Where'd you buy? Just in this area. Why'd you buy there? My parents live in that area. It's a nice area. And I'm thinking, I've looked at like 3000 data points before. I've decided these areas are good or not. And this other person has just decided mum and dad live there, so it's good. It's chalk and cheese here. We're completely different. And once we've done that data analysis and we found the perfect areas, we then start analyzing properties, we start sourcing properties, and those properties are always, they could be on the market, they could be pre market, they could be off the market. And that's based off relationships that we have with agents, because we've been doing this for five years now. We have lots of relationships with lots of agents in different areas. And then once we find the perfect property. We then negotiate on behalf of the client. If that property goes to auction, we go to auction for them. We run our own valuations, we do manual valuations. We don't just rip off the call logic number. We do a manual valuation on all the properties. And we only will ever buy a property if we can secure that property under market value and it ticks all the other boxes. And what I mean is, if that property is worth 500, we're buying it for under 500. So that you are making money essentially by signing a contract. You sign that contract, we bought it for 480. You've made $20,000 in equity instantly, right. And you're in a really top location, which means that property is going to continue to grow. And this is why our clients are always exceeding the market. We actually have a 100% success rate that all our clients exceed the market expectations or exceed the market averages, which is very good to my own horn. But that's our process and that's what a buyer's agent does. So buyer's agent, in a nutshell, is someone that represents the buyers in the market and helps them buy a property and will negotiate for them and take them through the process. What we do at first brick is we go a little bit beyond that and it's very data driven. We take care of the entire process, from data to search to negotiation. We organize due diligence for our clients. We have a team on the floor in every state except for the Northern Territory in Tasmania. But besides those areas where we never buy anyway, we've got people there, so we got people checking the properties for you. Our clients never have to leave their home. They're always at home. They're just chilling. We got people doing all the work for you and then we guide you through to settlement, which is when you get passed off to a property manager. But you never stop being one of our clients. And all our clients become friends. There's always constant communication if there's part of the whole process. And obviously if anyone's spoken to me or used us will know because we're very much about education. So during this entire process, we're always communicating the client. The client knows exactly what's going on. They know why they're doing everything they're doing and they're very confident because of the explanations. We don't just say, hey, buy this property, force them into it, they know why they're doing it. They have full control. They make the decision. At the end of the day, they've got to give us the green light. But because of the constant communication throughout, our clients are always very happy at the end. And like I said, always, 100% of the time, making more money than the average person purchasing property in the country. One of our most recent success stories, one of Fetty's clients as well. We purchased a property by the time it's settled, and we purchased it well under market value in a top location by the time it's settled. The client then sent me a screenshot of the new valuation. At settlement, it was $115,000 more than we purchased it for. And I said to him, if your property doesn't make any money over the next two and a half, three years, you're still beating the average, and that's on day one. So, obviously, not all our deals are $100,000 by settlement, but they're always making money. And it just makes sense to have someone on your side, because if you think about it, a real estate agent is selling properties every day. Most people buy a property once or twice in their entire life. So imagine going to a negotiation with someone who does it every single day, who knows the rules, who knows the laws, who knows everything back to front. And you're doing this once and as good as our podcast, good as the information is out there, there's no substitute for actually doing it. So trying to go into a negotiation for the first time or second time in your entire life against someone that does it every day, who's a professional negotiator, most likely going to be on the wrong end of that negotiation. You might get a deal, might not be a good deal, and people lie. I'm not going to say all agents lie, but people lie. And there's so much misinformation that sometimes it's just really hard to make a decision. So having someone that's on your side doing what they do day in, day out, it just evens the playing field and gets you that representation that you need as well in the market. So I think I tried to cover everything we do and some benefits, but I don't know if you guys have any other questions around it.

Fadi Yousef: 33:48

I think I'm also a live example. Even my Tasma, I know you're talking about, it was 115. But I think with my scenario, and I won't be too brutal on the real estate agents. Like you said, it's a new thing here in this country, the buyer's agents concept. I personally, until I met you, I didn't really completely understand, but when I went to purchase my first property, my first home. I think I had a pre approval for about six months. I just had no luck. And I had real estate agents. Km knows how many houses I went to visit, how many auctions I've went to. I even asked you, I need your help. Come to these auctions, the whole whispering in your ear, bid a little bit more or yeah, this is definitely within your price range. You waste about two to three months, like I did get to auction and you're there to witness what happened.

Kyrillos Mansour (KM): 34:44

Competing against, sorry, competing against your own clients.

Fadi Yousef: 34:52

And then I remember that day, man, I called you the next day and I'm like, you know what, man? I'm done. I need you. Just take over. And you know, my scenario, man, more than most is that you pretty much told me there's this property. It covered everything that I needed. It was brand new. I didn't even look at the plans, I didn't look at the room sizes. I didn't know what I was getting. It just ticked all the boxes. I'm like, let's do it. And I think maybe what was it two months after it was valued more than three hundred k more than what we purchased it for. So I think that was the biggest win for me, man. And since that day, I pretty much communicated that with a lot of my customers. I'm like, listen, this is my story. It's not that we're recommending anyone to you. We're recommending people that we've worked with, closely seen results day in, day out and other customers and experiences that they've had with first brick and yourself, it just goes a long way. Like you said, having someone on your side, especially in this industry where it's more of a sharks game, men like you need someone that knows what they're doing. You need someone that knows the data. Because as an everyday consumer looking to purchase property, I may know what I'm doing when it comes to loans or structures or policies, but when it comes to property or purchasing property, what do I call myself? Man? I was just a very uneducated customer where I was just hoping for the best and thinking that anything that was told to me from outside or from real estate agents was true. But I learned that lesson pretty fast. That wasn't the case. But I think you said it perfect, man. At the end of the day, you want someone on your side that knows what he's doing, knows the data, knows the information and is actually looking for your best interest. You're actually working for the actual buyer where real estate agents are working for the sellers and don't get me wrong, I completely understand their sales games, their sales pitches, because it does get the highest, I guess, price for their customer. But when you're looking for a property, I just don't see that real estate being on your side. That buyer's agent is on your side. And here's my question, man. A lot of people that ask us about how much we're going to pay for a buyer's agent, how much are people on average these days? And you would know the answer to this, paying to just list your house to go for sale.

Kyrillos Mansour (KM): 37:14

Obviously, all real estate agents are different. I think the general percentage is between, look, on the lowest end, one and a half percent, all the way up to 3% plus. I think most people are around at 2% plus GST. So you're talking on average, 2%, which is on a million dollar property. Obviously you're talking.

Fadi Yousef: 37:34

But what about the marketing? What about the marketing? Yeah.

Kyrillos Mansour (KM): 37:38

So the sales commission is that 2%, there's marketing fees and whatnot. On a million dollar property, you could be 25,$30,000 to a sales agent.

Fadi Yousef: 37:53

I would just rather save at 2030K when I'm looking to purchase a property, or I'd rather go and look at a property without competing with other buyers. I'd rather not go to auction, which is probably the best case scenario at all times. It just made more sense when. And just experiencing it firsthand was just like, I guess, a blessing in disguise where, wait a minute. I actually have someone on my side that can negotiate, look and find what I'm looking for. And I think that's the biggest advantage of a buyer's agent.

Kyrillos Mansour (KM): 38:26

We'Ve been running. Sorry, go ahead.

Mark Kilada: 38:30

I was just going to say it's one of the easiest services to sell. Because when people ask me, why wouldn't I just look for a property myself, I go to them. Do you know how much it costs to sell your house? Let's say you, as a novice, purchased a property before in your life, have never even been to Adelaide. Now you want to know exactly like you're going to find exactly where to speak in Adelaide, a place you're not familiar with, a place you've never been in your life, and a person who's not experienced in property at all, you're going to buy a place in Adelaide. If it's a bad decision, it's probably the most costly mistake you can make in your life. You just sell that property, let's say it's$800,000, 2%, 16 grand marketing cost, and they might need a stage of the property. All this sort of stuff. Let's call it another. I have no idea how much I'll be. Let's say it's like another two grand, for example. That's $18,000 for your mistake. There might be title fees. You paid stamp duty to enter into the market as well. And when you sell the property, let's say I had a customer that called me. She bought a property during COVID when anything that you bought was booming. Literally anything. She called me and she's like, she's really struggling with her repayments. She's trying to see what she can do. And she couldn't keep up with her repayments anymore. She's a new client to me. And then she goes to me, have you sort of looked into selling the property? And she's like, yeah. She's like, have you looked at the property valuations for me? I'm like, no, give me the address. Let me have a look. She sent me the address, and the current property was valued 50 grand less than she bought it for. Keep in mind, she paid stamp duty on top of that. So she's probably about 75 grand less if she sells it. And then on top of that, 75 grand, 50k short for 25k, roughly for the stamp duty that she paid initially. Have the solicitor fees to sell and the real estate agent fees. You're probably talking another 20k here. So she might be $95,000 less if she sells the property. She installed the property and still have a loan of 95k because she made that decision, because she tried to save a few dollars. To me, property is not something that you can guess and be lucky, because like I said, most costly mistake you'll make in your life if it's wrong. So instead of coming in and thinking that you'll be able to buy a good property on your first time in a timely fashion, just go to someone that does it every single day. It literally makes no sense to me. I honestly don't understand why people want to save a dollar when they come to buy a property. Because the second that they buy the property, they're already up. Like you said, km with the immediate equity. And then let's say the property km buys you outperforms yours. Obviously, there's almost 100% chance that that's going to happen. Given his experience and given that this person that's buying isn't very experienced. If there's a difference in 2% of the capital growth, which probably being very conservative, how much does that 2% of your 800 grand property. How much does that amount to after it compounds year on year for 1020, 30 years? Like, the difference is astronomical. We're not talking 510 grand here. We're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars. So I think it's one of the easiest services to sell because of that reason. Because how expensive it is to fix your mistake. And the benefits, if you pick right, sets you up for the rest of your life.

Kyrillos Mansour (KM): 41:44

I know you're very busy with your loans and whatnot, but if you need a job in our sales team, let me know. You could do some of our outbound calls. Yeah. Look, in a nutshell. We're big believers in use, experts in any industry. I like cars. If my car breaks down, I'm going to a mechanic. I'm not going to try and fix that at home. If the power stops and it's not the fuse and I can't just flick it back on, I'm calling an electrician. I've tried to do my own pest control. We still got pests. I call the pest guy, he comes, the pests stop. Why? I don't know, but that's what they do day in, day out. And it's the same thing. It's a point that I don't like to bring up, actually. That mark mentioned when I do speak to potential clients is if you make a mistake, it's going to cost you because it's a bit of a downer, but you're 100% right. It could be a very expensive mistake. So why not use someone that's going to make you money, not just not make a mistake. Anyway, we'll wrap it up. Fetty's got a tip of the won't. Mark doesn't have one, and I was going to put him on the spot, but after that nice spiel about, after that nice spiel, I'll let him go. But, Fetty, tell us your tip of the week.

Fadi Yousef: 43:14

So this tip of the week is a bit of a niche, but I think with a lot of people now adding solar panels to their homes to save on electricity, you can also save on your interest rate. There are specific lenders out there that will give you lower rates if you first of all have a brand new property within the 18 months, and if your property has solar panels, you're actually eligible for lower rates. And when I say lower rates, for example, on an unoccupied property, right now, every single unoccupied property sort of rate with any sort of lenders is above 6%. I think on average mark. Correct me if I'm wrong, it's around the six point on average, 6.2%, 6.25% for unoccupied property. These lenders, if you do have solar panels on your house, their rates are at 5.99% as of this morning, we've checked that rates at 5.99%. So if you're one of those customers that has solar panels, or you've got a brand new property, or you're looking to purchase a brand new property, and you're not going under the first home buy scheme, as your lender doesn't allow for that, you're actually up for much more lower rates than anyone else out there because of that purpose.

Kyrillos Mansour (KM): 44:24

Beautiful. Go back.

Mark Kilada: 44:30

I was just going to say, with everyone being very rate conscious at the moment, with rates being so high, a lot of people put their search on the big four banks and they really stop it there at the moment. The big four banks, as you can imagine, the big four banks have the market share in Australia with mortgages. So when we tell them, hey, one of your second tier lenders, our client is going to go there unless you match their rate a lot of the time, actually, ten times out of ten, with certain lenders that are priced lower at the moment, especially right now, with the bank's appetite, they will never match it. Never. So if you're walking into a branch, not only is your borrowing capacity going to be probably less than other banks, because you're looking at one policy, as opposed to 40 plus banks that we have access to, but you're also subjected to their rates, like we said before, and even if you say, hey, I found this rate with this particular smaller bank online, can you match them? They're just going to tell you no, straight away they might say, yeah, let me check. It's not going to work out. The big banks don't match them. So the big banks don't see themselves in competition with the small banks. So if you contact us, we have big banks, we have small banks, we have private banks. I'm doing a loan now. For someone who's purchased a property with brand new ABNs as a low doc loan, we have options for every particular client. So by walking into the bank, you miss out on so many benefits that we have mentioned here today, but also there's so many more that we haven't discussed.

Kyrillos Mansour (KM): 45:58

Two tips of the week, as I always do. Tip number one, use a mortgage broker. It's just pretty simple, right? Just don't go to the bank yourself. You're just not going to get a better deal. Something that you guys didn't mention that I will is you don't pay a mortgage broker. The mortgage broker works for you and they get compensated from the banks and from the loans and it's separate so it doesn't cost you anything to use them. And they're going to get you a better rate than if you were going to do the work for you. And they're going to do more work than if you did it yourself. It doesn't cost you anything and they're going to get you a better deal.

Mark Kilada: 46:41

And you sit up, no lines and you don't need to do anything. You don't need to go to a brand. We're subjected to your working hours. You work nine to five.

We'll meet at 07: 46:51

00 you go to the bank.

Kyrillos Mansour (KM): 46:57

I think you were wrong, Mark. I think the easiest service to tell is actually a mortgage broker because the alternate is I'm going to go to the bank during work. I'm going to be on the phone during my work hours waiting on hold. Then once I'm done with that bank that's probably taken 6 hours of my day, I'm going to have to call another bank and another bank and another bank then comparing myself with that advice.

Fadi Yousef: 47:21

And you're not another number to us, you're not another customer. And you will be hearing from us after settlement. That's another. We're in communication every three months. Every three months we're in communication with our customers so many times that we have customers coming to us that have gone directly to the branch and like, man, we just haven't heard from them. They haven't reduced our rate. As we mentioned on last week's podcast, Mark and I are so vicious in regards to trying to get the lowest rate from our customers. We're always constantly asking our customers, communicating with our customers, what's your rate now? We want to make sure you're on the lowest rate your current lender. If not, we're going to make sure that we're going to get the lowest rate for you. So you're not another settlement to us, you're not another customer to us. We want to make sure that you're looked after for the whole loan term. And like I said, we love to be in communication for our customers. The friendships that we've actually built from this business has been unbelievable. And the amount of learning that I think all of us have gained just seeing different sort of customers come through and seeing how they've been doing business how they've been dealing with their loans. It's also educational for us as well. So we're also learning through that process as well.

Kyrillos Mansour (KM): 48:30

Yeah, 100%. And so that's why my tip of the week is use a mortgage broker. And even if you're not sure, just give them a call. Right? They'll go through it with you. They'll tell you if you can borrow, if you can't, if now is the right time of your finances and whatnot. So give them a call. My other tip is, if you buy a webcam to record, take the sticker off before you start doing so. That's my other tip. Also, if anyone listening works with an Internet provider, please contact Ferdi because his Internet is shocking.

Fadi Yousef: 49:08

You guys realize when I dropped out.

Kyrillos Mansour (KM): 49:10

He'S finally taken the sticker off and he's dropped out and so many things. So please, he'll give you a free consultation.

Fadi Yousef: 49:16

I didn't know you guys realized. I thought it was that fast.

Kyrillos Mansour (KM): 49:21

I have to let you back into the room. You don't just come in. Anyway. After, like, six minutes of recording this, I was thinking we're going to be done in five minutes because how much more can we talk about? But somehow it's one of our longest episodes, so wrap it up. If anyone has any questions or wants to contact Fetty, mark myself, our details are always in the show notes. You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok. We're on everything. Any topic requests, please send them through. And thanks, as always, for listening. Ciao. Thanks.