From nurse to broker: meet Amie Parker
By Broker Codex Editorial
A nurse spends her life working with people who are frightened and vulnerable. The job is to explain what is happening in words they can follow, answer the same question as many times as they need to ask it, and stay calm while they cannot.
Amie Parker was a registered nurse before she was a mortgage broker. She now runs She's Got the Keys Mortgage Solutions out of Orange, in New South Wales, and the job turns out to need most of the same things.
What does a nurse bring to mortgage broking?
Patience, mostly. And the habit of never making someone feel stupid for asking.
Amie is deliberate about creating a space where clients can ask anything without bracing for a reaction. Home loans are full of terms people are embarrassed not to know, and most borrowers have quietly nodded along to at least one conversation they did not follow. She would rather they stopped her.
The other thing nursing leaves you with is attention to detail, because the detail is the job. In broking that shows up as communication: knowing where an application is up to, and telling the client before they have to ask.
Why did Amie become a broker?
She had already worked in property as a property manager in her early 20s, and she bought her own first home at 25, so the interest was there long before the career was.
What tipped it was the combination. Property, finance, and work where she is helping people directly. She says she loves it enough that it does not feel like work, weekends included, which is the sort of thing people say until you notice she worked for six months before her first commission ever landed.
She also works more hours now than she did in nursing, and is happier doing it.
Who does Amie work with?
First home buyers are the centre of it. She has written a free twenty page first home buyer guide and put it out with no email capture attached, on the reasoning that if it is genuinely useful, people come back on their own.
Beyond that she works with investors and owner-occupiers refinancing, women going through separation and divorce, single parents, and medical professionals, which is unsurprising given where she came from.
She has also built a niche most brokers have never thought about: solo mums by choice. Women who have chosen to become parents on their own, buying on a single income, often with assumptions from lenders and from everyone else that need working around. It is a small, tight community, and Amie is preparing to speak to it directly.
Why does lender policy matter more than the interest rate?
Because the rate is the number people arrive worrying about, and policy is the thing that actually decides the outcome.
Almost every client walks in asking about rates. What most of them discover is that the difference between lenders is not really the rate, it is what each lender will and will not accept: how they treat a single income, how they read casual or shift work, what they do with a deposit that came from a gift, how they count child support or a small business. Two lenders can look at identical clients and reach completely different answers.
That is where a broker earns their place. Amie spends her time working out which lender's rules fit the person in front of her, and a lot of the situations people assume are unworkable turn out to be a matter of the right lender, the right documents, or a plan that gets them there in twelve months rather than never. Lender policy varies and changes over time, so it always needs checking at the time of application.
Where does Amie work?
She is based in Orange and works with clients Australia-wide, most of it remotely.
For clients who want to sit down in person, she covers Orange, Bathurst and Dubbo, and will happily do it over coffee. In regional towns that still counts for something. People want to know who they are dealing with, and being able to point at the local conveyancer or building inspector you would actually use is worth more than a call centre.
What does Amie want clients to walk away with?
The feeling that it was nothing like what they expected.
She celebrates settlements with her clients, which sounds small and is not. For most people a first home is the largest thing they have ever done with money, and it usually passes with an email and a set of keys. Amie treats it as the milestone it is.
Does Amie charge a fee?
No. According to her profile, she is paid a commission by the lender when the loan is approved, with no direct cost to the client.
What is the best non-financial advice Amie has ever been given?
Never go grocery shopping hungry.
"I try very hard to stick to that rule," she says. "Because if I don't, I will duck into Woolies for milk and walk out $80 poorer with three bakery items, fancy cheese, a roast chicken, some sort of chocolate, no milk, and no coherent plan for dinner."
Which, incidentally, is the same discipline she brings to home loan applications. Know what you went in for. Do not get distracted by shiny things.
Where will you find Amie outside of work?
Usually working on some sort of project, or spending time with the people she loves.
She taught herself to renovate through a mix of YouTube and watching her dad, and has transformed two houses so far. She absolutely dotes on her eight month old Bernedoodle, River (nickname: destruction), and enjoys exploring the best cafes in Orange with family and friends, and getting up to mischief with her three year old nephew, Harry.