Sometimes the best laid plans of mice and men go astray.

It's the Friday of the third week of the month and here I am, blogging for the first time this week.  It has been quite a hectic week.

Avid followers of my tale will recall that the third week of the month is supposed to be the week where I finish off my appointments and continue any follow-ups from the last 2 weeks.

Well, there have been 3 factors at work for me this week which made this week absolutely flat out.

The first is a great thing, I was referred on to new customers and so have had many more appointments than I had originally anticipated for the month.  That's always a nice thing so I'm not complaining at all.

The second isn't so great.  There is a rush on at the moment.  First home buyers and investors looking to take advantage of low interest rates and the governments generous FHOG package have tripled and quadrupled the volumes of business for many lenders.  I'll take a special mention here of RAMs and St George as the only 100% lenders, as well as CBA and Westpac who've also been very busy. How does this impact me? Well many of my clients have been chasing an answer to their applications as well as Real Estate Agents and Solicitors wanting to know the status of applications as finance due dates approached.  In many cases I've had to extend the finance dates on contracts as there is simply no way that these deals will be assessed in time.  Obviously this makes many people, buyers, vendors and the other professionals who service them - very, very nervous.  Our job is to keep everyone informed and so at the moment I'm doing a lot of informing and co-ordinating.  Important note to all, please make sure that in the current market you set expectations appropriately from the outset.  Advise the client and the Real Estate agent early on that things are VERY slow and then keep them and their solicitor informed along the process.

The third factor for me this week has been that our Aggregator has just changed their software for the payment of commissions.  While this doesn't sound like a big deal, both Amanda and I have had to be trained in the software and then reconcile every single row of data in our loan book.  It's all working fine, but there was a lot of extra homework for both of us that we hadn't anticipated.  But, this job, once done - stays done so we've embraced the change, put our heads down and got on with the job.

It has certainly been a busy time though.  I hope that everyone out there is busy because there is a lot of work out there for brokers in the current market.