At CMI, diversity and inclusion have been core values from the beginning. They remain a top priority, particularly as home buyers increasingly engage mortgage brokers for expert guidance on a diverse range of issues preventing them from qualifying for a mortgage.
We’ve built a team that is diverse in age, gender, background, education and experience. This helps us understand different cultures and unique life events, and ultimately structure challenging deals to secure financing for clients with diverse backgrounds and circumstances.
CMI realizes that promoting diversity throughout the mortgage industry is important for eliminating discrimination in Canadian housing, and we want to play our part so that you can feel confident bringing clients to CMI, even in situations where they may have been turned away from banks or other traditional lenders in the past.
Differences in race, education, gender and wealth are proven to be major barriers to home ownership in Canada. A 2021 study by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) found that Black, Arab, Aboriginal people and Latin American Canadians had the lowest homeownership rates, and that gap has grown since 2006.
Canada continues to be a top destination for immigrants around the world. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) reported there are over 2 million Canadian immigration applications across all categories currently backlogged in the system, waiting to be processed. In many cases, borrowers can get turned away from banks and traditional lenders for several reasons related to immigration status, such as if a borrower is waiting for confirmation of permanent residency or currently residing in Canada on a work permit.
As Canada’s premier private lender, CMI is in a position to help you by breaking down some of the barriers that your clients may face. Over the COVID-19 pandemic, we leveraged feedback from our broker partners to design our financing solutions to help vulnerable borrowers.
New Canadians specifically can struggle to get financing from traditional lenders because, aside from a lack of credit history, these borrowers need a certain level of assets to qualify for “New to Canada” customer segments the banks tend to stream them to.
CMI is able to offer financing to many of these borrowers, once they are employed, and can cover the down payment and fees because we can structure our deals without a credit history. We also require less documentation and can potentially work around a borrower’s residency status.
To further put brokers in a position of comfort, the CMI team speaks several languages, including French, Italian, Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Slovenian, German, Croatian, Mandarin, Cantonese, Greek and Russian, so you and your clients can feel confident doing business, even if English is not your first language.
The diverse backgrounds of the CMI team have also helped foster innovation and growth within the organisation, propelling a digital-first approach. Employee feedback has helped build an underwriting automation system which improves the accuracy of our underwriting process, and with our broker partners’ help and feedback, we’ve been able to create and constantly innovate our broker portal and digital submission process that can turn deals around in hours.
It’s evident that there are many reasons why diversity and inclusion should be an essential part of any organisation, and why CMI has invested so much into these values. We understand that this focus benefits each player in the mortgage ecosystem: the borrower, broker and the lender.
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