On Friday the 28th of March there was a massive turn out for the MoneyMate and Investor Magazine Awards for 2008. We were pleased to see that yet again Irish Mortgage Brokers was short-listed for Mortgage Broker of the year for 2008 and in anticipation of a win our team happily sipped wine and mingled. The judges on the night were leading figures from the Irish Financial Services industry, the Chairman of PIBA, Jack Fitzpatrick, the head of the IBA, and the head of IMAF (these are all broker representation bodies).
I’ll cut straight to the chase, we didn’t win. Rea Mortgages won (it’s actually the 3rd year in a row that they took the title so a big Congratulations to the crew over in Rea!).
I like to take the view that we did our best and sometimes you don’t get the title you seek. More importantly in 2008 there are over 1,000 mortgage brokerages in the Irish Market, out of that 1,000 only 4 get shortlisted, Irish Mortgage Brokers and Rea were the only ones who were on that list the last two years running.
On the Technology side we were also shortlisted in 2007 for the best Financial Website in the nationwide Golden Spiders awards. This had us punching above our weight against the likes of Axa Insurance and Rabo Direct, again, we were a bridesmaid and not a bride but getting listed against companies that are literally a thousand times our size was a compliment to say the least!
My dad was a professional race car driver and he said ‘winning isn’t everything but second best sucks’ so its fair to say that we are looking forward to next years competition where we hope to compete again! Having said that, we have been short listed for more awards than any other Mortgage Broker in the last two years so at least we are heading in the right direction.
We never shirk competition and certainly we can learn from many companies so we’ll be doing just that and putting in a strong performance for the 2009 competition! The main thing today’s post must say though is a big thank you to all of our loyal customers, without the ongoing support of the people who we help (and whom in turn make it possible for us to earn a living) we wouldn’t have a firm to be so proud of. We’ll be making plenty of innovations for 2008, including online video consultations, as well as a video blog (vlog) and more of our widely read (and featured on the radio) Mortgage Blog.
The one think you can be sure of is that we will be trying to innovate and improve all the time, we were the first Mortgage Broker in Ireland with genuine ‘online-mortgage tracking’, others have since followed but we were the first. We are the first with an extensive Mortgage Blog and we’ll be the first with a Vlog and online video talks about mortgages