Which locations and how many advisers and broker firms do you cover in your role at Molo Finance?
I cover Central, North, West and East London, plus the North M25 circular and the M3 and M4 corridors. The broker mix is genuinely broad, from large key accounts and established firms right through to smaller independent practices. No two conversations are the same, which keeps the role interesting.
What personal talent or skill is most valuable in doing your job?
Customer service and following through on what you say you’ll do. That sounds simple, but it underpins everything. In this role, the quality of your engagement with brokers is what defines you. They have options and will work with people they trust and who deliver. Building a reputation takes time, and you can lose it quickly if you don’t back up your words.
What personal talent or skill would you most like to improve on?
Knowledge. You can never know enough, and I genuinely believe that. Every day is a school day in this market, whether it’s criteria changes and new products or evolving landlord needs. The willingness to keep learning is what can help you stand out. The moment you think you know it all is probably when you start falling behind.
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What’s the hardest part of your job?
There simply aren’t enough hours in the day, as the role covers a large geography and a wide range of brokers. Doing it properly and giving people the attention they deserve takes real time. It’s a constant balancing act.
What do you love most about your job?
Every day, every phone call, every conversation is different, and I genuinely enjoy the variety. What I love most, though, is getting stuck into the problem cases and complex enquiries with brokers. The straightforward ones take care of themselves. It’s the difficult ones where you can really make a difference, and where the job becomes even more rewarding.
What’s the best bit of career-related advice you’ve ever been given?
Slow down and give people quality time. When you stop and engage, whether with a broker working through a difficult case or just someone with a question, you understand the situation and they feel it. Everyone is busy, and that’s exactly why taking the extra time stands out. It was advice I had to hear more than once before it properly landed, but it’s shaped how I work.
What has been the biggest lesson you’ve learned in your career?
In sales, the instinct is always to find a way to make it work. But you can’t do everything that lands on your desk and trying to often doesn’t serve anyone well. A quick, clear ‘no’ is genuinely valued in the broker market. It respects their time and lets them move on and place the case somewhere that can help. It took a while for the shift in my mindset to occur, but it made me better at the job.
How do you keep up to date with developments in the market?
I listen. I subscribe to industry updates and read, but the most valuable intelligence comes from conversations with brokers and peers, not to mention the movement of the market itself. You get a feel for what’s happening on the ground that you can’t always get from a newsletter.
What is the most quirky or unique property deal you’ve been involved in?
The hybrid multi-unit block (MUB). These properties sit in interesting territory with their unusual internal layouts and mixed uses. The planning considerations for them don’t always fit neatly into standard criteria. There’s no shortcut either. You have to understand what the property is, how it’s being used and what the right valuation approach looks like before you can move forward. They’re complex, but that’s what makes them interesting to work through.
Tell us about your trickiest case.
A client owned the freehold and 100% of the leaseholds within a block and wanted to remortgage all 12 leasehold flats to raise capital for a further buy-to-let (BTL) purchase. Normally, our exposure limits would have made that difficult. But after working through it with the team, we were comfortable treating it in the same way we would a multi-unit freehold block (MUFB) with 12 units. It went through.
What was your motivation for choosing this career?
The broker relationships and the sheer variety. I enjoy the freedom to manage my own diary and the challenge of helping brokers work through their more difficult cases.
If you could do any other job in the property sector, what would it be?
I think I’d fit well at a mortgage club or network. I enjoy the events and the broader industry relationships, as well as the strategic element of that environment. Many of the broker relationships I’ve built would carry over, which appeals to me due to the continuity.
What did you want to be growing up?
I always knew I wanted to work somewhere surrounded by people. Whether on a personal level or in business, social interaction is what makes work meaningful. The specifics have changed over the years, but that part never does.
Where do you see yourself in five years?
Developing further here at Molo. I genuinely enjoy the culture and the team, and there’s real ambition across the business, supported by Australian non-bank lender ColCap, to push further into the specialist BTL market. That’s an exciting space to be part of and I want to grow with it.
If you could have one superpower, what would it be?
Teleportation. The time I’d save on travel would be transformative – more brokers, better conversations, less time on the M4.
What is your strategy for tackling challenges?
Whatever the problem, I try to step back and look at it from every angle before reacting. I work out what the best outcome looks like, then figure out the most logical route to get there.
What is your greatest skill, work or otherwise?
Being myself, which might sound like a non-answer, but it’s consistently proven its worth. People do business with people they trust, and trust comes from being genuine. It applies just as much outside work as in it.
And finally, what’s the strangest question you’ve ever been asked?
“If your brain had a loading screen, what would it show?”
