It might be easy to assume that mortgage brokers have an easy job. After all, they find people who are interested in buying property, and offer them delightful terms - in stark contrast to the 'deal with the devil' terms that they might have obtained at banks or credit unions. They offer safety, privacy, the security of having more confidence that the best deal possible has been obtained for a given FICO score, and the banks love them too, because mortgage brokers bring in great mortgage clients, and don't ask for payment until they deliver valuable mortgage clients - and that's you, by the way, who, having signed the mortgage papers, are as valuable as cash in the bank.

Is there a risk in signing a mortgage? Not for the bank, which the moment it meets you has a look at your FICO, and calculates what it can get for your mortgage contract on the open debt markets, which conveniently you cannot directly access except as an investor.

You might as well write a cheque to the bank for $50,000 right now, because it's probably up by about that much on even a small mortgage, almost the moment you sign. And the mortgage broker gets a nice signing fee of about 1/25th of that, as the bank's way of saying thanks.

So why do mortgage brokers get offered lower rates? Because they are part of lots of deals, and can steer a lot of those $50,000 cheques one way or another.

So now you know. And if you're hungry for debt to 'purchase' the title to a piece of property, then click here for a competent mortgage broker who can help you do that as cheaply as possible, provided your property is located somewhere in BC.