Optical store’s struggles bring Vancouver small-business challenges into focus

Glen Korstom
Western Investor

Vandalism, red tape, inflation, online competition among hurdles facing local entrepreneurs

Vandals have broken windows at Azra Kamrudin and Anar Mawji’s Abasa Optical store four times since early 2020.

That is more than in any comparable time in the 32 years since the sisters founded their eyewear boutique. 

One incident caused about $10,000 worth of damage, as thieves broke into the store and stole merchandise while breaking eyewear frames. 

The sisters paid a $1,500 deductible and claimed that damage on their insurance. They financed the other more minor incidents out of their own pocket because the insurance company stopped covering them, Kamrudin told BIV.

“We take our frames down from the showcase every night before we close up,” she said. “We haven’t had a break-in since we started doing that.”

The women also installed movable metal caging that they wrap around display cases.

Lawlessness on the streets is only one of many challenges that the women face. Homeless people sometimes camp outside the store or next to their door, which deters potential customers.

The women sometimes ask their building’s manager to urge the street dwellers to move along. 

“Sometimes we have asked them ourselves, but we stopped doing that because we’ve had a couple of aggressive people,” she said. 

Sometimes Abasa Optical staff have to wash away urine from the store’s exterior.

Suppliers have raised prices for designer eyewear frames and for the lenses that Abasa Optical staff then custom-cut on site. 

“Our business is quite competitive, and the prices have gone up, but we dare not raise ours,” Kamrudin said. “You raise prices a few dollars and you could lose that customer.”

There have been some glitches getting supplies because of supply-chain outages, she added.

The women do not sell their eyewear online, and instead aim to be known as a boutique that has some frame brands that are not widely available, such as Theo and Face a Face.

One challenge in not selling eyewear online is that the women have to play by a different set of rules, which can put them at a disadvantage, Kamrudin said. 

Online competitors allow customers to plug in whatever prescription details they want. Online sites also offer online eye exams, and online ways for customers to determine the distance between their pupils.

“If somebody comes into the store without a prescription, and says verbally, ‘I need a minus 250, minus 250’ – exactly the same as what they would do online – I couldn’t sell them the contacts or glasses,” she said.

“Legally, I can’t. I have to have the person produce a prescription and then I must take all the measurements of the customer’s cornea. I have all these rules that I must abide by, according to the College of Opticians of British Columbia.”

She said the situation has “hamstrung” the business and is comparable to someone being able to self-authorize controlled painkillers if they buy them online, but needing a prescription if they want to get them from a pharmacy. 

“A contact lens is a medical device,” she said.  •

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© 2022 Western Investor

Metro Vancouver home sales plunge 34 per cent from last year

Western Investor Staff
Western Investor

 April sales also down 25.6 per cent from March as month-over-month prices increases stall at a lofty high

House on East 40 Street, Vancouver, listed May 3 at $2.19 million, a price close to Metro’s new benchmark detached house price of $2,139,200. | REW.Ca / Royal LePage

The benchmark price of a home in Greater Vancouver in April inched up just 1 per cent from March as sales dropped more than 25 per cent and were down more than a third from a year earlier.

The composite price, at $1,374,500, however, remains the highest of any Metro region in Canada.

The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver (REBGV) reports that home sales totalled 3,232 in April 2022, a 34.1 per cent decrease from the 4,908 sales in April 2021, and a 25.6 per cent decrease from the 4,344 homes sold in March 2022.

Last month’s sales were 1.5 per cent above the 10-year April sales average.

 “So far this spring, we’ve seen home sales ease down from the record-breaking pace of the last year,” said Daniel John, REBGV chairman.

There were 6,107 detached, attached and apartment properties newly listed for sale across Metro Vancouver in April 2022, down 23.1 per cent compared to April 2021 and an 8.5 per cent decrease compared to March 2022 when 6,673 homes were listed. The total number of homes currently listed for sale on the multiple listing system is 8,796, a 14.1 per cent decrease compared to April 2021 and a 15.3 per cent increase compared to March 2022, when 7,628 properties were available..

“This is not last year’s real estate market,” noted Kevin Skipworth, partner and broker with Dexter Associates Realty, Vancouver, who noted that rising interest rates and government legislation have helped to dampen demand.

For all property types, the sales-to-active listings ratio for April 2022 was 36.7 per cent. By property type, the ratio is 25.3 per cent for detached homes, 47.1 per cent for townhomes, and 45 per cent for apartments.

Sales of detached houses saw the biggest decline, plunging 41.9 per cent from April of 2021, though the benchmark house price, at $2,139,200, was up nearly 21 per cent year over year and 1 per cent higher than in March 2022.

Sales of condo apartments reached 1,692 in April 2022, a 26.1 per cent decrease compared to the 2,289 sales in April 2021. The benchmark price of an apartment home is $844,700. This represents a 16 per cent increase from April 2021 and a 1.1 per cent increase compared to March 2022.

Townhome sales in April 2022 totalled 578, a 40 per cent decrease compared to the 964 sales in April 2021. The benchmark price of an attached home is $1,150,500. This represents a 25 per cent increase from April 2021 and a 1.1 per cent increase compared to March 2022.

In past month, British Columbia announced it would bring in a “cooling-off” period to allow homebuyers to walk away from a purchase without penalty within a time frame yet to be set; and the City of Vancouver increased its empty home tax to 5 per cent.  In April, the Bank of Canada increased the overnight lending rate 50 basis points to 1 per cent, which immediately increased mortgage interest rates. Further rate hikes are expected.

“We could be heading to a complacent market,” suggested Skipworth. “A slowdown that awaits the next real estate super cycle.”

 

© 2022 Western Investor

Saskatchewan minimum wage set to soar this fall

Western Investor Staff
Western Investor

Saskatchewan’s minimum wage will rise 10 per cent to $13 per hour on Oct. 1.

 Saskatchewan’s Labour Relations and Workplace Safety Minister Don Morgan announced a hike to the province’s minimum wage, effective Oct. 1.Photo by Larissa Kurz/SASKTODAY.ca

Saskatchewan minimum wage-earners are getting a raise.

The provincial government announced May 3 that the province’s minimum wage will increase from $11.81 per hour to $13 per hour on Oct. 1. The hike, an increase of 10.1 percent, will be followed by increases to $14 per hour on Oct. 1, 2023 and to $15 per hour on Oct. 1, 2024.

“World events continue to put upward pressure on the cost of living in Saskatchewan and across Canada,” Labour Relations and Workplace Safety Minister Don Morgan said in a media release Tuesday. “Our government is committed to ensuring life is affordable for our low-income residents by increasing the minimum wage over the next three years. This commitment to affordability will support Saskatchewan workers, and ensure Saskatchewan is the best place to live, work, and raise a family.”

Global forces have conspired to push Canada’s inflation rate in March to a new 31-year high of 6.7 per cent.

According to the Retail Council of Canada, Saskatchewan currently has the lowest minimum wage in the country.

Nunavut leads the way at $16 per hour, followed by Yukon ($15.70), Northwest Territories ($15.20), British Columbia ($15.20), Alberta ($15), Ontario ($15), Quebec ($14.25), Prince Edward Island ($13.70), Nova Scotia ($13.35), Newfoundland and Labrador ($13.20), New Brunswick ($12.75), Manitoba ($11.95) and Saskatchewan ($11.81).

B.C.’s minimum wage is set to rise to $15.65 an hour on June 1, part of a new system that indexes the hourly minimum to inflation.

However, if nothing else changes between now and Oct. 1, Saskatchewan will still have the third-lowest minimum wage among the provinces and territories after its increase.

According to Statistics Canada, approximately 3 per cent of Saskatchewan workers received minimum wage in 2018, the latest year for which statistics are available.

The provincial government’s media release said the planned increases over the next three years “reflect a market adjustment, rather than using the province’s traditional indexation formula.”

That formula gives equal weight to changes to the Consumer Price Index and the average hourly wage for Saskatchewan.

According to Statistics Canada, the average hourly wage for employees paid by the hour in Saskatchewan last year, excluding overtime was $27.01. This was the median for all provinces and territories.

The province says the planned increases will align workers’ pay with changing market forces.

“As we continue to grow Saskatchewan, we want to attract quality investments and jobs so that all citizens can benefit,” Morgan said. “Making this change to the minimum wage is a step in that direction.”

 

© 2022 Western Investor

Strata industrial planned as Port Coquitlam site sells for $10.65 million

Diane Strandberg
Western Investor

A five-acre property in the Dominion Triangle area of Port Coquitlam will be developed with small-bay warehouse units.

 At more than $2 million per acre, this Port Coquitlam property (590 Dominion Ave.) is slated for light industrial.Lee and Associates

More warehouses and more jobs could be coming soon to Port Coquitlam, after a developer snapped up one of the last big parcels of land in the Dominion Triangle.

The property, located at 590 Dominion Ave., was sold for $10.65 million to a private company, according to commercial real estate broker, Lee and Associates, and the development will be a small-bay industrial strata project.

Orion Construction will build the development.

The Dominion Triangle is becoming a growing hub for Greater Vancouver foodies looking for a new place to go. Commissary kitchens, such as Gong You Kitchen, coffee shops, such as the massive coffee roastery and café C Market, and Earthling Café, which sells French pastries, as well as craft beer businesses, such as Boardwalk Brewing, have located there in recent months

Close to the Traboulay PoCo Trail, the Dominion Triangle area has also become a destination for cyclists, who drop by some of the new businesses to check out the latest craft beer.

Other major businesses in the area include Walmart, Home Depot, Canadian Tire, Shoppers Drug Mart, Mark’s Work Warehouse, Starbucks, CIBC, RBC, Costco and McDonald’s.

Successful projects nearby include Rivers Edge Business Park (Conwest), Riverwood Business Park (Circadian), the Fremont Indigo (Mosaic) neighbourhood, and Fremont Village (Onni), a mix of housing and retail.

Vancouver commercial real estate firm Lee and Associates brokered the deal for $10.65 million, slightly under the $11.25 million asking price, according to Sebastian Espinosa, industrial real estate specialist with the Vancouver company.

The deal, which closed in February, shows the value of the land in Port Coquitlam’s newest industrial area.

“The property sold for near its asking price however it is a challenging property due to the (BC) Hydro right of way, therefore some consideration of this was reflected in the sale price,” Espinosa explained in an email to the Tri-City News.

Still, the five-acre property bordered by Seaborne, Fremont and Dominion avenues sold for over $2 million per acre.

Espinosa, who is a partner and vice-president of industrial, said land suitable for industrial development is in high demand and scarce, due to land availability zoning, agricultural land regulation, and other constraints.

“We have a major shortage of industrial space in the Metro-Vancouver market with vacancy rates at all-time lows, sitting at 0.80%. In the Tri-Cities it gets even tighter with vacancy rates at approximately 0.5%,” Espinosa stated.

“It makes it difficult to get supply brought to the market, therefore increasing costs to tenants/users alike, reflected in rising industrial rents, which ultimately gets passed down to the consumer as increased prices or inflation.”

The Dominion Triangle is located in the northeastern quadrant of Port Coquitlam, north of Lougheed Highway, south of Dominion Avenue, and west of the Pitt River.

 

© 2022 Western Investor

50-year-old Burnaby apartment snapped up after owner slashes price by $1.25M

Chris Campbella
Western Investor

Older real estate in Burnaby is seeing strong interest from buyers.

Seton Place is a 41-suite three-storey apartment building located in the heart of the established Burnaby Heights neighbourhood at 3940 Pender St.Goodman Commercial

A run on old apartment buildings continued as one iconic Burnaby rental building that is more than 50 years old was snapped up after the owner slash the price.

Seton Place just sold after being put on sale for $12 million, a price reduction of $1.25 million, according to Goodman Commercial Inc.

Seton Place is a 41-suite three-storey apartment building located in the heart of the established Burnaby Heights neighbourhood at 3940 Pender St., just one block south of Hastings Street and three blocks east of Boundary Road.

Built in 1970 and improved on a large 26,474 SF (217’ × 122’) RM3 zoned lot, the building’s suite mix comprises 8 bachelors, 30 one-bedrooms and 3 two-bedrooms. Other features include lane access at the rear, 40 secured underground parking stalls, and 32 residential storage lockers plus 9 others that have been converted into one large storage room.
Burnaby Heights is filled with three-storey rental apartment buildings built in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Sales activity in the Lower Mainland’s commercial real estate market reached the second-highest annual total on record in 2021, according to the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver (REBGV). 

In the fourth quarter of 2021, Burnaby saw $655 million in commercial properties – a $532M jump from the third quarter.

Burnaby saw 106 office and retail property sales, 44 industrial sites, one multi-family property and 11 commercial land sales. The commercial land sales along sold for nearly $500 million.

There were 2,659 commercial real estate sales in the Lower Mainland in 2021, a 65.3 per cent increase from the 1,609 sales in 2020, according to data from Commercial Edge, a commercial real estate system operated by the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver (REBGV). 

Last year’s sales total is the second highest on record behind 2016 when 2,848 sales were recorded.

The total dollar value of commercial real estate sales in the Lower Mainland was $14.396 billion in 2021, a 66.7 per cent increase from $8.635 billion in 2020.

Follow Chris Campbell on Twitter @shinebox44.

 

 

© 2022 Western Investor

Metro Vancouver home sales fell in April, said real estate board

Cheryl Chan
The Vancouver Sun

The slowdown comes after the Bank of Canada increased interest rates in a bid to tamp down inflation.

 Despite the slowdown in sales in April, residential home prices remained steady. Photo by REUTERS/Carlo Allegri/File Photo

Greater Vancouver’s housing market appears to be slowing down, although prices remain steady.

According to the latest report from the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, there were 3,232 residential home sales in April — a 25 per cent drop from March and a 34 per cent dip from the 4,908 sales recorded last April.

Despite this, April sales still remain 1.5 per cent above the 10-year sales average for the month.

Daniel John, chairman of the real estate board, said home sales have eased from last year’s “record-breaking pace.”

“While a small sample size, the return to a more traditional pace of home sales that we’ve experienced over the last two months provides hopeful homebuyers more time to make decisions, secure financing and perform other due diligence such as home inspections,” said John in a statement.

 

The slowdown comes after the Bank of Canada increased interest rates by a quarter point in March and by half a percentage point in April in a bid to slow inflation. Experts are anticipating another hike at the rate announcement in June.

The total number of homes for sale on the Multiple Listing Service in Metro Vancouver sits at nearly 8,800, up 15 per cent compared with March.

Home prices remained steady, inching up by about one per cent compared with March. The benchmark price for a detached home in the region is $2,139,200, $1,150,500 for a townhouse and $844,700 for a condo. The prices are about 16 to 25 per cent higher — depending on the type of home —— compared with April 2021.

The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver represents more than 14,000 real estate agents in Burnaby, Coquitlam, Maple Ridge, New Westminster, North Vancouver, Pitt Meadows and Port Coquitlam.

Other municipalities in the Lower Mainland like Surrey, Delta and Abbotsford are represented by the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board.

 

 

© 2022 Vancouver Sun

Personal loans platform sees popularity grow with brokers

Fergal McAlinden
other

Launched in 2020, the company seeks to connect everyday borrowers with individual investors

 Eighteen months after launching digital loans platform GoPeer, the company’s co-founders say it’s going from strength to strength – and that Canada’s mortgage broker community has emerged as a potent referral source.

The product went live in September 2020, aimed at allowing everyday borrowers to secure loans by connecting them with other Canadians who are seeking to invest. The latter gain access to a marketplace that lets them invest in a fraction of loans, while borrowers receive an amount that they repay each month.

For borrowers, unsecured loan terms of either three or five years are available from a low of $1,000 as high as $25,000, with rates starting from 7.5%.

The company’s progress since its inception has seen it receive over $150 million in loan applications to date, according to co-founder and CEO Marc-Antoine Caya (pictured top left). It’s also carved out a niche as a popular option for mortgage brokers whose clients are in need of a specific solution to improve their mortgage prospects.

“One of the things we realized is that there’s a lot of traction with mortgage brokers,” Caya said. “Many of our clients come from referral from brokers to consolidate their loans or refinance their lines of credit or credit card – essentially to qualify for a better mortgage.”

Significant work has gone into developing the platform’s technological capabilities, Caya said, making it as easy as possible for users to take a loan application through the system (sometimes in as little as two minutes).

Read next: goPeer to launch Canada’s first peer-to-peer lending platform

“You don’t need to submit any documents. You don’t need to submit proof of ID, you don’t need to submit a T4, income paystubs or anything,” he said. “We’re fully integrated with various partners in the ecosystem. We get rich data sets from various sources that our system uses to automatically underwrite loans.”

GoPeer’s team is “small and lean,” Caya said, with an average interest rate of around 16% on loans offered. For borrowers with better credit, meanwhile, the company is “highly competitive with banks” where unsecured term loans are concerned.

At present, the company does not directly offer mortgages, even if those offered rates make it an appealing choice for brokers to send their clients to where more mainstream or institutional lending is not available.

“The primary use case that we’re seeing is those mortgage brokers [that] refer us their clients that typically didn’t have the line of credit [options] a lot of people would have,” said Caya.

Rates that are competitive with or lower than those offered by many non-bank lenders mean brokers can provide alternative solutions – ultimately allowing them to close and obtain better deals for their clients.

“We’re sort of in that sweet spot for that use case,” Caya said. “That’s where we see a lot of traction from those channels like mortgage broker referrals.”

It might be assumed that launching a company amid the COVID-19 pandemic would come with its own complications, particularly with the lending and borrowing landscapes shifting drastically in 2020.

Read next: Mortgage technology – how it will impact the space in 2022

However, the pandemic provided an unexpected tailwind for the fintech, according to co-founder and chief technology officer Joseph Buaron (pictured top right), who told CMP it opened the eyes of many Canadians to the opportunities presented by digital borrowing and lending

“It kind of pushed more people online and helped people adapt to this new model. At the time, people were still more comfortable going in person,” he said. “Even though they typically didn’t like doing things and waiting weeks for it to happen, they weren’t as familiar with the online lending approach. That’s changed significantly with COVID.

“The other thing was that one of the concerns was defaults increasing with people losing their jobs. It seems like there was the opposite effect because of the government aid – fewer people [were] defaulting, so it helped us on both sides there.”

The lack of delinquencies means the company is seeing better performance on its loans than it had originally envisaged, said Caya, to the ultimate benefit of its investors (GoPeer itself does not take any profit from its interest rates charged).

Central to its next steps will be leveraging technology to advance analytics and constantly improve underwriting, as well as identifying key segments to help grow the company’s business: not just mortgage brokers, but also those borrowers that “fall through the cracks” of the normal banking system, according to Caya.

“Think of self-employed [individuals] or newcomers,” he said. “Those are areas that we want to continue to improve and offer additional services to, for these less well-served customers.”

 

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Is Canada’s urban exodus on the wane?

Fergal McAlinden
other

Some signs indicate that Canadians’ interest in a home away from the city could be declining

 As offices and downtown businesses shut their doors at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, record numbers of Canadians began to set their sights on a move to a smaller city or more remote location.

The figures were striking. Statistics Canada revealed in January that over 64,000 Toronto residents moved to another part of Ontario between mid-2020 and mid-2021, with Montreal losing almost 40,000 residents to other parts of Quebec during the same period.

That marked a 14% spike in the number of people who moved away from Toronto within Ontario compared with the previous 12-month period, while the number leaving Montreal for another part of Quebec skyrocketed by 60%.

However, as pandemic-era restrictions continue to ease across the country and downtown office spaces gradually reopen, there are some signs that Canadians’ interest in a home away from the city may be cooling.

Bank of Montreal’s (BMO’s) latest housing survey, published on April 25, revealed a 5% increase in interest in purchasing a home in major city centres across the country, with a preference for moving further away from the city witnessing a decline.

That could be an indication that Canada’s housing market is set to return to some degree of normality during the remainder of the year, according to BMO Capital Markets senior economist Robert Kavcic.

“We could see much more balanced conditions very soon, as the Bank of Canada is expected to raise interest rates further throughout the remainder of the year,” he said. “That will bite into affordability and possibly temper market psychology.”

Still, the market’s underlying fundamentals remain strong, he said, as a robust job market and demographic support bode well for its long-term future.

Avison Young’s Office Vitality Index, which measures foot traffic in major urban centres across North America, revealed that Vancouver had recorded its highest volume for 2022 so far in the week ending April 17.

Read next: Will the Toronto housing market ever slow down?

Meanwhile, across North American cities, average weekday visitor volume was at its highest peak since the week of March 02, 2020 – before nationwide lockdowns were announced – although foot traffic remains well below its pre-pandemic levels, the company emphasized.

Three western Canadian cities ranked among the top 10 North American cities with the highest downtown foot traffic in the week ending April 17: Edmonton in second place, Calgary in fifth, and Vancouver in sixth.

Despite that trend back towards the city, other indicators suggest that smaller and more remote areas could continue as attractive post-pandemic options for many Canadians.

In its 2022 Small Markets Report, real estate franchise RE/MAX said that high liveability in those markets outstripped affordability as the main factor drawing Canadians toward quieter areas.

“It’s no secret that people have been moving all over the country to achieve their homeownership dreams – and the story of the pandemic is [that] everybody wanted a bigger house and a bigger yard,” RE/MAX Canada’s president Christopher Alexander (pictured top) told Canadian Mortgage Professional.

“But this really shines a light on [the fact that] it was more than just moving out of the city to get that. They wanted the lifestyle of smalltown charm, being close to parks and amenities and things like that, that make life a lot more enjoyable.”  

Read next: Hybrid work model likely to dominate: Avison Young executive

While Alexander emphasized that trends of migration to and from big cities were nothing particularly new, he said that the prevalence of smaller markets during the pandemic had ultimately proven a positive development for Canada’s housing market.

“I think parts of the country are almost being rediscovered,” he said. “I think that’s really encouraging because there’s so much pressure on Southern Ontario, lower mainland British Columbia. That’s where you see property values [at] just astronomical levels.

“It’s encouraging that people are looking elsewhere now, finally, because I think it presents a great opportunity for different parts of Canada to really thrive and offer quality of life to a whole other demographic of people.”

The RE/MAX report sounded a note of concern on Canada’s smaller markets, indicating that prices were likely to rise in some regions by up to 20% throughout the rest of 2022 as a result of low inventory and continuing high demand.

While liveability in those areas remains a key consideration for out-of-market buyers, 57% of survey respondents in smaller markets said they feared their town’s liveability could decline because of growing demand – with 43% saying rising prices could have a negative impact.

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What’s been happening in Canada’s MIC space?

Fergal McAlinden
other

A prominent executive in the sector talks CMP through recent developments

As Canada’s mortgage and housing landscapes continue to shift in the midst of rising interest rates, how are the country’s mortgage investment corporations (MICs) faring?

Business has been brisk throughout the year to date, according to an executive at a prominent British Columbia-based MIC, with a healthy pace likely to continue even as the full impact of that new rate environment becomes clear.

“The flow of business we saw in 2021 has continued into this year and even with the recent rate bumps, there really hasn’t been a slow down,” Loren Hawkins (pictured top), national manager, broker relations at ThreePoint Capital, told Canadian Mortgage Professional.

“We’ll see how the additional rate bump adjusts people’s thinking, but in the MIC space so far we’re still seeing business come in the door.”

A noted trend in recent times has been small, newer players in the MIC space extending their reach and moving into different markets, Hawkins said – for instance, eastern-based MICs moving into the west, and vice versa, for diversification purposes.

It’s no surprise, either, that MICs have had to grapple with the same challenges faced by many lenders in the red-hot mortgage market of recent years: sky-high volumes and an expectation among mortgage agents and brokers for files to be turned around in rapid time.

That means it’s doubly important for agents and brokers to ensure that they’re submitting complete files and as comprehensive an application as possible so that it can be turned around in the manageable timeframe they expect, according to Hawkins.

Read next: How private lending carved up its niche in the Canadian mortgage space

“There’s a demand for quick turnaround, but at the same time we’ve also experienced a lot of incomplete applications: lack of information or the previous lenders information still in the application, and we’re left to try to figure out what’s going on,” he said.

“That’s a detriment to brokers trying to get a response, whether it’s with us or anybody else, during a busy time. We need that clear communication on what you’re expecting or looking for in the file because otherwise, we don’t have time to chase people down.”

ThreePoint’s document stipulations are comparatively light on the submission side, according to Hawkins. On a refinance, for instance, the company requires an application submitted via Expert, Lendesk or Velocity with supporting documents of a satisfactory appraisal, confirmation the borrower is current with CRA, and an overall confidence that they can afford the mortgage.

In some recent applications, he said that although the borrowers have shown income, they’ve been unable to support themselves in reality on what’s left over – meaning that the company has ultimately passed on the file.

Still, he said that brokers who expect or require a quick turnaround should make sure they’re sending as detailed a file as possible.

“The notes are key to explaining why, when and what their exit strategy looks like. Any documentation they may have up front should be sent in, then obviously that turnaround time can be quite quick,” he said. “It’s important for brokers and agents to reach out to us prior, should they require a short funding to see if we’re in a position to assist.”

Read next: What’s in store for private lending in 2022?

Hawkins emphasized the value of contacting lenders through the appropriate channel – whether the head of broker relations, business development manager (BDM) or national sales manager – to help determine in advance whether a positive decision on a file is feasible.

“We’ve had a lot of files come in over the last six months where a broker we may not have an existing relationship with expects a 48-hour turnaround in funding,” he said. “If they had simply contacted our office, we could have easily advised them that that may not have been reasonable.

“If they’ve got a challenging file or a quick turnaround, those are the times when the best thing to do is reach out. That’s what the BDM or national sales manager is there for, to help bridge that gap between underwriting and the submission. When everybody’s busy, time is the precious factor.”

As an MIC that lends in four provinces – BC, Alberta, Manitoba, and Ontario – ThreePoint also strives to ensure that at least one of its team members starts earlier, Hawkins said, in order to field calls from eastern-based brokers so that their turnaround time isn’t negatively impacted by the time difference.

On his own priorities in 2022, Hawkins said he’s been working on establishing connections with existing partners whose acquaintance he may not have already made, particularly in smaller or more remote areas that the company serves.

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