Guiding you forward
I’ve been in mortgage lending since 1988 and a licensed mortgage broker since 1999. I hold BCFSA licence #087740 and I’m the Designated Individual for Canadian Mortgage Experts Inc., which operates as The HomeHappy Team @ Canadian Mortgage Experts.
I work from West Kelowna and serve clients across British Columbia by video and phone. I rarely meet anyone in person, and after thirty-odd years I’ve concluded that’s usually better for the client — it means the conversation happens when it suits them rather than when they can get across town.
I built one of the largest mortgage brokerages in Canada and then deliberately walked away from running it, because managing brokers turned out to be a different job from the one I actually wanted.
I started on the side that says yes or no, not the side that asks. That matters more than it sounds: before I ever represented a borrower, I spent a decade learning what an underwriter is actually worried about, which is rarely what the borrower assumes.
From 1994 to 1998 I was at Delta Credit Union — which later merged into Envision Financial — finishing as Branch Manager in White Rock. Then a year at Canada Trust, now TD Canada Trust, as a Mortgage Sales Manager.
So when I tell a client what a lender is likely to do with their file, it isn’t a guess about someone else’s business. I ran that side of it.
In 1993 I left lending to become a Realtor. The market crashed about four months later and I went back to the bank.
It was a short detour and a formative one, for two reasons.
The first was working for myself. Four months was enough to know I wanted that eventually, and it never really left me.
The second I’ve thought about ever since. I was brand new, in a market that had just turned hard, watching experienced people around me struggle badly — and watching a handful of others carry on almost untouched. The difference wasn’t talent and it wasn’t marketing budget. It was relationships that went deep. Those people got called first. They never had to chase a stranger, because the people they’d already looked after kept bringing them the next one.
I was too new to do anything with that observation. But I made a note in my head, and it turned out to be the most valuable thing I took from that year.
It’s why this business runs on introductions rather than advertising, and why the after matters as much as it does. A relationship that only exists while the deal is open isn’t deep enough to survive a bad market — and there is always another bad market.
There’s a specific thing that pushed me out, and it’s the reason this business exists in the form it does.
Sitting in a branch, you regularly know that the right product for the person in front of you is across the street. You know it. And you can’t sell it, and you can’t tell them — because your job is to place them in what your employer offers, and the conversation stops at the edge of the product shelf.
I found that harder and harder to live with. Not because anyone was doing anything wrong; a bank sells its own products, and that’s what a bank is. But the client sitting there believes they’re getting advice, when what they’re getting is the best available answer from one shelf.
Brokering was the way to have the whole conversation. That’s the entire reason I made the move, and it’s still the thing I’d say the job is for. It’s also the argument behind our guide to using a broker versus going to your bank.
I’m not reconstructing that in hindsight. When Canadian Mortgage Professional profiled me in 2017, I gave them the same answer: “Offering only one company’s products didn’t sit well with me.” Brokering, I told them, meant using the whole market to find the right lender for each client. Nine years later I’d put it exactly the same way.
Worth knowing, because the reputation lingers well past the facts.
Mortgage brokering in Canada only took its current shape in the early 1990s, when lenders began paying brokers for the business they placed. Before that, a broker was paid entirely by the client — a fee, out of your pocket, on top of the mortgage.
If you had to pay someone a fee to arrange your mortgage, you only did it when the bank had already said no. So brokers were, quite reasonably, understood as the place you went as a last resort.
That economics changed more than thirty years ago. On prime placements today the lender pays, not you. But the reputation outlived the reason for it — which is why a lot of people still assume that going to a broker means something has gone wrong.
I became an independent mortgage broker and founded what became Canadian Mortgage Experts.
I spent two stretches at Invis — 2001 to 2002, then 2005 to 2010. When I left, I was Invis’s highest-volume mortgage broker in Canada.
In December 2010 I started a new Dominion Lending Centres franchise with twelve people on the team.
By 2011 we were third for volume across the entire DLC network in Canada. By 2012 we were first — and we stayed first every year through 2019, until DLC merged two large Toronto firms to put someone ahead of us.
At its peak the team ran to more than 130 brokers, closing roughly 4,000 mortgages a year — about $1.8 billion in annual volume, and more than $10 billion over the life of the business.
Along the way the industry noticed. I was named to Canadian Mortgage Professional’s Hall of Fame in 2017, and to DLC’s Elite Hall of Fame the year before.
In February 2017 I was called before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance to testify about Ottawa’s changes to the mortgage rules. I brought three recommendations. Seven years later, the federal government enacted two of them.
The full account, and the parliamentary record →
In 2023 and 2024 I stopped managing mortgage brokers.
The honest reason is that running a brokerage had stopped being the job I signed up for. Politics, personalities, and a great deal of time spent supervising other people’s files rather than working on my own. What I had always liked — and what I’d been doing since 1988 — was sitting with a household, understanding what they were actually trying to build, and finding the structure that got them there.
So I went back to that. The franchise agreement itself ran until December 31, 2025; we now co-broker through Indi Mortgage. The HomeHappy Team is small and intends to stay that way.
Something is lost in that decision — scale, mostly. What’s gained is that the person who testified before Parliament about how these rules work is the person who reads your file.
Before, during, and after. I think about the business in three phases, and the third is the one most brokers skip. Before is how you find us and what you learn before you ever apply. During is application to funding. After is the fifteen or twenty years that follow — the renewals, the rate opportunities, the maturity dates nobody diarises. Most of a mortgage’s cost is decided in the after, and most of the industry stops caring at funding.
Strategy before rate. A quarter-point is real money. A penalty clause calculated on posted rates, or a renewal you didn’t shop, or a structure that trapped you when circumstances changed, is usually bigger. I’ll tell you when the cheapest rate is the wrong mortgage.
Lifetime management, not a transaction. Every mortgage we fund goes into HomeBrew, which tracks equity, rate position, renewal horizon and penalty timeline — so the next conversation happens because something is worth doing, not because you happened to remember.
Published methodology. Our guides set out how the work is actually done — how lenders read self-employed income, how penalties are really calculated, how to compare renewal offers properly. A method you can read is a method you can hold me to.
I’m self-employed too. Not “used to be.” I run my own business, do my own tax planning, and know exactly what it feels like when a lender’s formula misreads the result.
I’d rather you checked than took my word for it.
A licensed mortgage broker in British Columbia, holding BCFSA licence #087740, with a lending background dating to 1988 and independent brokering since 1999. He is the Designated Individual for Canadian Mortgage Experts Inc., which operates as The HomeHappy Team @ Canadian Mortgage Experts, and works from West Kelowna serving clients across BC.
The operating name of Canadian Mortgage Experts Inc., a BC mortgage brokerage established in 1999. The firm co-brokers through Indi Mortgage. It was a Dominion Lending Centres franchise from December 2010 until that agreement ended on December 31, 2025.
Lending. From 1994 to 1998 at Delta Credit Union, later merged into Envision Financial, finishing as Branch Manager in White Rock, then a year at Canada Trust (now TD Canada Trust) as a Mortgage Sales Manager. He became an independent mortgage broker in 1999 and later spent two periods at Invis, leaving as their highest-volume broker in Canada.
It began in December 2010 with twelve people. By 2011 it placed third for volume across the entire Dominion Lending Centres network in Canada, and from 2012 through 2019 it was first every year. At its peak it ran more than 130 brokers and closed roughly 4,000 mortgages a year — about $1.8 billion in annual volume, and over $10 billion across the life of the business.
Because supervising other people’s files is a different job from advising clients, and the second one is the work he wanted. The team is deliberately small now.
Rarely. The practice is digital — video and phone — across British Columbia. It means scheduling around your life rather than around a commute, and it works well for the great majority of clients.
Yes. On February 1, 2017, before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance, on Canada’s mortgage rules. Two of the three recommendations made that day became federal policy in 2024.
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About the author: Michael Lloyd has been in mortgage lending since 1988 and a licensed mortgage broker since 1999 (BCFSA licence #087740). He founded and led DLC Canadian Mortgage Experts to over $1.8 billion in annual mortgage volume before returning to full-time client work. Michael leads The HomeHappy Team @ Canadian Mortgage Experts, co-brokering under Indi Mortgage, serving homeowners across British Columbia with strategy-first mortgage planning and lifetime mortgage management. In 2017, he testified before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance on Canada’s mortgage rules — two of his three recommendations became federal policy in 2024.
