With less than six years of industry experience, Deanna Ezzy isn’t what you would call a mortgage veteran. And yet she is known as Canberra’s best female broker, the country’s 6th best performing female broker, and was ranked number 46 on Mortgage Professional Australia’s Top 100 Brokers list.
In 2013, a mere three years into her career, Your Investment Property named her Mortgage Broker of the Year, and last year she was ranked number two in Choice Aggregation’s top performing brokers for NSW/ACT.
A finance strategist at Trilogy Funding [now with More Than Mortgages], Ezzy is undoubtedly a testament to the fact that broking is a profession in which the barriers to entry are relatively low, and career progress can, as she has proven, be incredibly rapid.
“We’re so lucky in that, you know, you don’t have to go to uni for four years. It’s an industry where, if you get mentored right, you can move straight in, so I think it’s a big opportunity…”
Ezzy is quick to attribute much of her success to the mentoring she received, she says, when she was began working under Ed Nixon, the CEO of Trilogy Funding, who is still her boss today.
“He brought me on as a trainee broker. From the day I started he just gave me so much positive reinforcement … He would say to me, you’re going to be a way better broker than I ever was! He just gave me all the support that I needed… and I still get all the support I need,” she says.
This is particularly relevant given the recent release of the MFAA’s Young Professionals Report, which stresses the importance of young brokers learning from the older generation of brokers, and the fact that Ezzy herself is considered a ‘young professional’.
“I think it should be mandatory,” she says when asked her view on mentorship in the industry. “Only because there’s so much to know. I don’t even know how you would start without a mentor … it’s 100% important. You definitely need someone there to help you out, I’d say especially in the first twelve months.”
Ezzy believes that management that makes mentorship a priority not only creates a nurturing and supportive work environment for their young brokers to learn and succeed, but their business overall will benefit as well.
“[The Trilogy management] are quite smart in that they want their employees to grow and they’re quite open about the fact that the more we personally grow, the better the business is going to do,” she says.
Ah, but the woes of regulation
But the path brokers are walking is not as seamless as it used to be, and as a specialist in investor lending, Ezzy has plenty to say on the topic of regulation. Off the back of APRA’s speed limit changes at the end of 2014, Ezzy has noticed a big change in the value of loans she is writing.
“I think the regulatory changes for me have been probably more difficult than your average broker because we target investors. So many of my clients have multiple properties, and they were at a point twelve months ago where they could continue to invest – it was a lot easier to do stuff like get cash out and do renos, and the restrictions weren’t quite as tight,” says Ezzy.
