Macquarie Bank rates number one according to mortgage brokers as home loan book exceeds $20 billion

03 October 2006

An annual survey of 300 Mortgage Brokers recently released by industry magazine Mortgage Professional Australia (MPA), ranks Macquarie as the best mortgage provider for “overall service and support to the broker channel” in the last 12 months – the second consecutive year Macquarie has won this award.

Commenting on the award, Craig Thompson, Head of Mortgages Australia said “we take great pride in winning this award for the second year running. It is a great honour and we appreciate the recognition from our broker partners.”

Mr Thompson also announced today that Macquarie had reached a major milestone last month with its Australian home loan book now exceeding $20 billion.

Mr Thompson said, “despite the slow down in the Australian property market and increased interest rates, Macquarie Mortgages has continued to grow across both its retail and wholesale businesses and is on target to grow by more than 30% this year.

"Our recipe for success is to offer innovative product solutions and an all round better quality of service. Macquarie has used brokers and aggregators as the primary retail distribution channel since we began operations ten years ago. We believe that we are the only provider in the market that can claim to be ‘the broker-channel friendly bank’. This is a distinction we are proud of as we continue to see an overwhelming majority of our home loans being sold through third parties" he said.

Macquarie’s focus on service is highlighted in the MPA broker survey results which ranked Macquarie number one for “loan approval and turnaround times”. The brokers also ranked Macquarie first for Business Development Managers quality and broker support, which considers levels of broker training and the ability to provide up-to-date information.

“In an increasingly competitive mortgage market, we have been successful in selling more home loans with greater average loan sizes than the market average. The quality of our book is further highlighted by our loan retention rate which is longer than the industry average.”

“We believe there is still a lot of potential for Macquarie Mortgages Australia to grow. While $20 billion in home loans is a notable milestone, we are still a small player in terms of overall market share, given that the entire mortgage market is more than $724 billion,” Mr Thompson added.

Commenting on Macquaries’ future plans for mortgages globally, Frank Ganis – Head of Mortgages and Securitisation predicted that mortgages will continue to be an increasingly significant part in the growth of Macquarie’s overall business.

“We are looking to build on our success in Australia and today, Macquarie operates mortgage businesses in the USA, Canada and Italy. The offshore businesses are set to grow rapidly over the next few years and there are significant mortgage opportunities in other markets around the world for Macquarie to deliver its expertise in this area” Mr Ganis said.  

For more information please contact:

Craig Thompson
Head of Mortgages Australia
Tel: (612) 8232 9516

Frank Ganis
Executive Director and Global Head of Mortgages
Tel: (612) 8232 3071