Is your bank… offering you the best mortgage rate possible?
It’s a familiar scene. You head in to your bank branch to sign up for a mortgage. The lady at the counter asks you to “have a seat and someone will be with you in a moment”. You wait for a few minutes and a staff person comes and introduces herself to you and escorts you into her office. You sit down and begin discussing your mortgage needs.
Suddenly, it hits you: this staff person is paid by the bank to sell you a mortgage that will generate as much profit for the bank as possible. You begin to feel like the poor fly in the spider’s web: trapped.
But wait, you do have options.
Actually, you have three basic options:
1. accept whatever rate the bank lady is willing to offer you.
2. go and visit as many banks as you can and hope to find a lower rate somewhere.
3. leave, and immediately call a mortgage broker, and let him find the best rate for you.
Increasingly, people looking for mortgages are turning to option 3—and for good reason. And the reason is very simple: the mortgage broker is on your side, not the banks.
You see, as a mortgage broker in today’s mortgage market, we have access to a huge number of prospective sources of funds for your mortgage. And the best part is, we are not a staff person of any of those lenders. Yes, we are going to get paid by a bank, but we will get paid pretty much the same amount regardless of where we get your mortgage money from. So, we can perform our work as your independent mortgage professional by opening up the entire mortgage marketplace to you—not just the specific mortgage offered at your particular bank.
The benefits to you can be significant:
Mortgage payments that can be noticeably lower than what your bank was offering
Knowing that the mortgage broker is presenting you with the best option he has available from the entire market.
Your credit bureau report will only be run once by the mortgage broker, not once by each bank that you apply to.
You do not have to waste your time going from bank to bank hoping to get the best rate.
If you want unbiased mortgage advice, you need to call a mortgage agent.
Professional, independent advice—it’s up to you. Contact us today.
Renewing your mortgage
If you already have a mortgage with a Canadian lender, they will send you a Renewal Notice shortly before it is time to renew your mortgage. They do this for a number of reasons:
They want to retain your business because most of their profit comes from mortgages that are renewed, as opposed to new mortgages.
They know that the vast majority of us will simply sign the renewal form and send it back to the lender. Knowing this fact, the banks know that they can offer higher interest rates at renewal, thereby increasing the banks’ profit.
The banks know that if they offer their Renewal Notice relatively close to the maturity date of your mortgage, most Canadians will not bother to shop for a competitive quote, thereby allowing the bank to get you to pay them a higher rate of interest than if you had taken the time to shop around.
In today’s competitive mortgage marketplace, there is no reason to simply sign back your Renewal Notice without checking to see what interest rate you should be paying. All it takes is one short call to a mortgage broker. Within minutes, you can find out if your bank is treating you as a valuable customer or not.
If you want to be pro-active, call us today and let us know when your mortgage is maturing. We will make a note to call you in time to give you an independent opinion on what your interest rate should be.