Broker on why sharing her life on social media boosts business
Katie Brown believes in keeping it real. Be yourself, she says, and let your clients get to know you. It’s how she’s built her business, sharing her professional and personal life on social media. It’s clearly working – she has a growing broker business that she loves.
“Be personable, don't be afraid to share your life,” Brown (pictured) told Mortgage Introducer. “Let people see you are a real person. It’s showing that you can relate to a client on another level. When I was younger, before joining the industry, I’d think of someone in finance as a bloke wearing a suit, behind a desk in a posh office.”
Brown certainly doesn’t present that image. Smartly dressed and professional-looking though she is, with almost 1,500 followers on LinkedIn, she works remotely from home, and over 2,300 followers of her Instagram account see life events such as her entertaining her niece and nephews and caring for her pets. “Clients come to me through social media, I think, because I make myself relatable,” Brown said. “I'll talk about my day-to-day activities, my weekends and things like that. I think that's a big thing that's made my business grow to what it is today.”
If Brown’s career had gone another way, her Instagram page might now show her cooking up a storm in a kitchen. As a teenager she studied to become a chef, but she switched direction when a college tutor spotted that she might better suit a customer-facing role. Brown went to work for an estate agent, aged 16, and absolutely loved the business, working her way up from office assistant to property valuer. When a role for mortgage administrator became available there, she went for that too and eventually began her CeMAP training to become a broker. Alongside all of this she started buying and flipping properties, taking on her first property aged just 19. “You don't get rewards without risks,” she noted.
She’s been self-employed since 2023, working under The Mortgage Mum name. “I've been in the property industry for 11 years,” Brown said. “So even though I'm young, I've got a lot of wealth of experience from all avenues and I really do think I am a better broker because I've been on the other side of a transaction. I've seen the difficult negotiating, I've also bought properties myself, so I know firsthand what the process is like for clients as well. So that's really what I tailor my approach to when I'm giving my advice.”
READ MORE: What lenders need to do better for brokers
The importance of a personal touch as a broker
While Brown likes her clients to get to know about her, she likes to get to know about them too. “I know my clients’ children's names, their pets’ names, if they've got any holidays booked,” she said. “I’d like a client to be with me for the full mortgage term, and I do view them as a friend - I want to protect them, I want to see them do well. I do thoroughly believe the personal touch is so important to being a broker, and it’s also putting yourself in a client’s shoes and the service of getting back to them in a timely manner. Obviously, the industry is changing almost every day at the moment, so it is impossible to know everything about every lender's criteria, but it’s about doing your research, really getting to know what product is going to suit your client.”
As well as mortgages, Brown also advises on protection, an issue she feels passionately about. Yes, it’s a useful source of extra income for a broker, she acknowledges, but she has seen its value, following a friend’s diagnosis with multiple sclerosis. “She was a single mother, with young children and she had a critical illness plan,” Brown shared. “She always says, had she not had that critical illness plan in place, she would not be able to afford her mortgage. She says it was her best decision and that's one of the reasons I looked into it more. A lot of people are saying it's too expensive, they can't afford it, because of the cost of living. One thing that I always think is crazy is that by law we have to have car insurance, to insure a tin box, but we don't insure ourselves. I really don't think it's talked about enough.”
Still only 27, Brown has already achieved a great deal in her working life, and she has no regrets about keeping out of the kitchen, professionally – a chef’s life certainly wasn’t for her. “I don't think I will change my career now,” she said. “I really do enjoy this and I'm really, really passionate about it. My plan is to keep growing – not too big that I don’t keep the service, but to keep facilitating clients and to just keep the personal touch.”
