Speaking to this publication, Babek Ismayil (pictured), founder and CEO of OneDome, said: “We will grow most organically through recruitment, which we’ve been doing throughout the entire year. We’re also going to grow through acquisitions of firms.
“The key criteria [are] obviously [the] quality of the firm in terms of the team – it’s the people business at the end of the day, it’s the quality of the team, the track record in terms of compliance and a business and whether we can add value or not.
“The key thing is we would never buy a company just to keep it as is. We would look at it in terms of whether we can add value and whether the people want that as well.”
Ismayil said it is currently doing around 44,000 transactions per year on an annualised basis and the goal is to get to 120,000 transactions.
He said that following the acquisition of Mortgage Intelligence, it had been in discussions with “lots of firms” and there were a “lot of very productive discussions”, adding that every time an acquisition was announced, the number of talks was growing.
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Ismayil said OneDome wanted to be known as a firm that “gets things done”, and one part of that was ensuring that transactions progress quickly.
He noted that the speed depends on the sellers, and the fastest transaction was done in one month before reaching approval from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
“I mean, it [depends] really on how serious the seller is. If they put their mind to it, then it will happen within [a] few months, but some people might take time to make a decision,” he said.
“We’ve been approached by a lot of brokers who are actually hungry to grow. They want to build a business,” he noted.
Ismayil said the plan for 2026 was originally to bring 200 brokers on board, and last year it had around 35-40 brokers, but now it has around 540 brokers.
“We’re not scared of growing people, obviously it’s all about having the right company, right broker, right type [of] firm that culturally matches and makes sense for us to work together and we can bring value,” he said.
OneDome’s HomeBuyer service and tech focus set it apart
The “fundamental difference” between OneDome and other mortgage networks, Ismayil said, is that it is “tech-first” and provides business opportunities for brokers.
He pointed to the recent £7.5m investment from Channel 4 Ventures to launch a national marketing campaign to provide its HomeBuyer service next year that would bring in leads.
Another key differentiator for Ismayil is its “exclusive flagship product”, which is a homebuyer service. The all-inclusive home buying package brings together mortgages, conveyancing and purchase management for a single fixed price of £999.
“Essentially, we’ve taken [the] entire home buying process and turned [it] into a retail product that somebody can just buy off the shelf. We’ve had an immense amount of success and product market fit by British customers in terms of loving the product and taking it over this more disjointed experience.
“We do believe, long term, integrated services are the way forward, because right now, the process [is] very disjointed, and we wanted to bring it together,” he said.
Ismayil said that on the back of requests from brokers, it had brought out a product that brought together legal services and mortgage advice into one product.
“The reason customers like the product is because it tends to be quite a bit cheaper to use that service. It’s a lot faster than the national average time to transact property, but it’s also quite a lot simpler – they deal with one platform, as everything is in one place. There’s no repetitive data entry, no repetitive provision of information to broker versus lawyers, that all happens in one place,” he noted.
OneDome broker productivity boosted
Ismayil said that looking at the average productivity rate of its brokers, in terms of mortgages written, those on the “traditional journey” with OneDome are around twice the average UK mortgage broker, and for those on the “digital journey”, productivity could be 4-4.5 times higher than the UK average.
“We will provide you tools. We make it simple, and then you make a decision [on] how many mortgages you’d like to write,” he said.
Ismayil said when he spoke to brokers, the common themes that came up were whether technology is a “threat or friend” and where to find leads.
“All the things that kind of block industry from growing, it would be around finding new opportunities and finding capability and capacity. You can either go and recruit more people, or you can make your people a lot more productive.
“I think technology could be framed for brokers, if it’s embraced, and I think this industry is absolutely open to having technology assist and help in increasing and growing the productivity or at least making their life easier.
“There are a lot of cases of double keying or using several systems to do one task, so we’ve looked at all of that to… see how we can actually bring it to one platform so people can also do [it] all in one place, rather than using multiple tools,” he added.
OneDome: What’s on offer
Ismayil explained that it had three different packages for brokers: Seed, Grow and Scale.
The Seed package is for solo brokers who tend to do around £50,000-60,000 per year and want to grow to around £100,000-150,000 per year.
The package will allow the firm to build their brand with access to leads, introducers and marketing support and access to its technology lender panels and HomeBuyer Service.
The Grow package is for broker firms looking to scale from a £250,000-plus turnover, and there is support for recruitment, branding and operations, as well as access to more leads and introducers and the option to trade under their own brand.
Ismayil said there were a few Seed brokers who have actually combined to become a business and team, moving up to the Grow level.
The Scale package is aimed at firms with £700,000-plus turnover of seven-plus brokers.
As part of the package, OneDome will offer capital investment and acquire 10-51% of the business and gain exclusive rights to the OneDome brand in their area and first refusal on growth opportunities. There is also strategic planning, national partnership and bespoke pricing.
“Those are the businesses where we would help them to take the business to [the] next step, if that’s what they want. We would be happy to put our money where our mouth is by buying a stake in that company so they understand that we are really serious about helping them to grow.
“This is not just a marketing gig to get them to sign up to us, but we will put our money within the business. We also will offer them an exit plan, if that’s what they want, and the key USP we have is our exit plans are formula based. This is a hardcore formula in the contract so people know what they [are] going to get in black and white,” he said.
Ismayil said the goal was for brokers to grow compliantly, as “if they grow, we grow, and if they don’t grow, then we don’t grow”.
“That’s the fundamental difference. We treat these brokers as a part of [what] we call OneDomers, of which there are now about 685, who are a mixture of employed and self-employed brokers, but are all connected together with the same mission.
“We see them as a part of our team, as a part of our community,” he said.
OneDome to launch specialist finance academy
OneDome is also working on launching a specialist finance academy, which will offer training to brokers who want to learn more about specialist lending.
“Margins in the prime mortgage market are getting tighter, and the volume of product transfer business is getting bigger. Banks are paying less for product transfers and it’s a trend that most likely will continue… so that’s a big threat for brokers.
“So, what brokers really need to do is to evolve their game and go into other spaces that could… potentially be a lot more lucrative for them and also be able to provide customer more holistic service,” he said.
Ismayil noted that not all brokers would want to expand into specialist areas of the market and it would “always allow them to send business wherever they want to send the business to”, but if a broker “is eager to learn new things and develop, we want to help them”.
“I think offering that will stop a lot of appointed representatives (ARs) going directly appointed (DA), because a lot of them would go DA, because they want to be able to do more,” he added.
