FEATURE / CMP TOP 10 COMMERCIAL
ENGINEERING SUCCESS
Experience speaks volumes in commercial brokering and newbies face hard times but an even harder choice, one industry veteran tells Don Horne What is the best way to enter the world of commercial brokering? For one man, all you need are a couple of engineering degrees and experience in fighting a war. An understanding of English helps, too – but isn’t really necessary. “I’m 60 years old, and half of my life I spent in Israel and half in Canada, with 29-and-a-half of those years as commercial broker,” says Chaim Dotan, founder and president of Venture Financial Ltd., based in Vaughan, Ont. “When I came to this country I couldn’t spell the word ‘mortgage’ – it was by sheer mistake that I got into this business.” Dotan, who holds two engineering degrees from his native Israel, came to Canada in 1983 when his Canadian wife wanted to return home. “She didn’t get used to the Israeli lifestyle,” Dotan remembers. “So we came here with our two-year-old son and moved into my wife’s family’s basement. All I had was $2,700 in my pocket, and a lot of rejections from different employers telling me I was ‘overqualified’ for my line of work. Thank God I never got a job as an engineer!” By pure chance Dotan saw an advertisement in a local paper from an Israeli man who was looking for someone to work providing leads for mortgage brokering. “I called and I went to the interview and he said ‘You got the job.’ But it is on commission,” he says. Dotan explained that he needed money, and was told that he would be provided with educational courses on mortgage brokering and there would be a free lunch. “Back then brokering was pretty much unlicensed,” says Dotan, “and at that time a free lunch sounded really good.” Dotan was taught the basics of finding clients and putting together a mortgage deal (passing it along to the broker to be closed). “That first six months I made $500. That’s it $500.” Dotan saw that the real money was in being a 30 | AUGUST 2013
mortgage broker, and so he went to take the course. But his English was still minimal. “I understood how it all worked, but the English side of the exam was difficult, and there were a lot of words I hadn’t even heard of before,” he says. It was with a little help from another friend that Dotan was able to obtain his brokering licence, mostly based on his track record of success in brokering deals, and was taken under the wing of a syndicated private lender. “He had a lot of access to private money, and I now had a nice office to work out of,” he says. “He gave me the institutional side of the business, because he didn’t want to do it himself.” Dotan’s first deal came and went almost without him realizing it. “It was a development at Sheppard and Kennedy, and my English was so poor,” he laughs. “The lender issued a commitment, and we went to the borrower’s solicitor’s office and they signed off on the deal. When the lender told me ‘You just made a deal’, I said ‘How do you know?’” It was a $3 million deal, and Dotan received a one per cent commission - $30,000. “When I got my fee my broker told me to go and certify the cheque,” he says. “I asked him, ‘What does certify mean?’” Dotan credits much of his business success to his engineering education and military training and experiences. Therefore as a broker you have to be very tenacious and never give up, says Dotan. “It’s a very tough game. You can work on a deal for six months and then lose it with nothing to show for it. It is heartbreaking.” Dotan says that commercial brokering is unlike any other business. “A grocer sells groceries – that’s tangible,” he says. “I’m selling money that’s not mine. I am presenting a 20-page document on a deal that might not happen, that might get hung up on an environmental assessment, get hit with development fees, or have a financial backer decide to move his money elsewhere.