Five months ago, Charles Touma swapped institutional lending for home loans. He left an executive role at Macquarie Asset Management to start Links Property Finance in Sydney’s Inner West.
The move ended a four-year stint at Macquarie Group, where his work centred on institutional lending and investment.
“I was proud of getting to that point and genuinely enjoyed the work,” Touma said.
What he took with him was a way of testing decisions. At Macquarie, he said, every decision meant tracing where the numbers came from and what might happen if assumptions shifted.
“The figures might look good on the day, but you still had to ask whether the decision would make sense a few years down the track,” he said.
He now applies the same thinking to home loans. Before Macquarie, Touma worked in private wealth and at an Inner West real estate agency while studying commerce at the University of Sydney. At open homes, he met renters who had been saving for years and still didn’t know what they could afford.
“I wanted to use what I’d learnt at Macquarie to sit down with someone like that, work through the numbers together and help them decide what felt right for them,” he said.
That’s why he set up Links so that clients deal with him directly, from the first conversation through to settlement.
Part of his development as a broker, Touma said, has been the shift in who he’s talking to. At Macquarie, lending conversations were mostly with finance professionals. Home buyers bring different priorities.
“A buyer might ask me, ‘What are we actually going to have left each month?’ That question can change the recommendation,” he said.
He points to the best interests duty, which ASIC’s recent review put under scrutiny, as the most positive development in broking. He sets out loan trade-offs in dollar terms, for example comparing what an offset account might save in interest with the extra cost of the loan that comes with it.
Touma also sees room for lenders to improve. He wants them to publish their requirements for self-employed borrowers in a format people can compare, and to give brokers a way to test unusual cases before lodging a full application.
“If your bank tells you to come back next year, it’s easy to take that as the answer everywhere,” he said.
The early months have already confirmed his decision. Seeing a photo of a client putting a sold sticker outside her first home, he thought: “This is exactly the work I wanted to be doing.”
Get the hottest and freshest property and mortgage news delivered right into your inbox. Subscribe now to our FREE daily newsletter.
