Friday, February 14, 2025
HomeMortgageKnow Your BDM: Grant Nisbet, Aldermore

Know Your BDM: Grant Nisbet, Aldermore



This week, Mortgage Solutions is speaking with Grant Nisbet, business development manager (BDM) at Aldermore.

Which locations and how many advisers and broker firms do you cover in your role at Aldermore? 

All mainland Scotland. 

 

What personal talent/skill is most valuable in doing your job? 

Building relationships that allow the advisers and firms to trust you and what you’re telling them. If there isn’t trust, it isn’t going to be a successful working relationship. 

 

What personal talent/skill would you most like to improve on? 

Being able to utilise the off switch more effectively. When I’m working, I am all in, and at night it can be difficult to flick that switch off. 


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What’s the hardest part of your job? 

Delivering bad news. Unfortunately, it isn’t always going to be the case that it’s good news you have to deliver. 

 

What do you love most about your job? 

Meeting all sorts of different people, and having to curtail your approach to each individual differently. 

 

What’s the best bit of career-related advice you’ve ever been given? Who gave it to you? 

A previous manager once said to me when I had a case that wasn’t quite going according to plan. I was getting frustrated with it and she told me to, “stop taking it personally and take the emotion out of the situation”, which helped me massively in sorting that particular application out, but has always stayed with me for any cases after that. 

 

How do you keep up to date with developments in the market? 

I find LinkedIn is a massively useful tool. I have an awful lot of broker contacts, contacts with other lenders, etc., and it helps me incredibly with what is going on within the market. 

 

What is the most quirky/unique property deal you’ve been involved in? 

Honestly, a particular deal doesn’t automatically spring to mind. There will be plenty of them, but I think that there is something quirky with most deals these days. 

 

Tell us about your trickiest case – what happened and how did you resolve the problem(s)? 

A case that took me about six months to get from application to offer at my previous employer. There were issues with the case from every different angle, with the property being declined at valuation due to a covenant being registered against the property. Then, once we managed to get that overturned, there was an affordability issue with underwriting assessment, and this was happening at a time when affordability was being changed every couple of months, so we had to navigate that at the same time, but we managed to get it to complete in the end and the clients were able to buy the property they were so desperate for. 

 

What was your motivation for choosing this career? 

In all honesty, I fell into the industry by complete chance. I applied for a job within the admin department at Santander and completely forgot about it until I got called to be taken for an interview. But I very quickly became very aware of the impact you have in helping people achieve their goals, whether that be purchasing their dream home or whatever the case may be, and take a great sense of pride in that. 

 

If you could do any other job in the property sector, what would it be and why? 

Valuer, potentially. We all deal with property valuations on a daily basis, but I would be interested in being in the valuer’s shoes. We all know what they have to do in order to provide a valuation figure for a property, but I’d like to have a go at it myself. 

 

What did you want to be growing up? 

I wanted to be in the fire service. My dad was in the fire service so spent a fair bit of time in the fire station that he worked out of, and I was always fascinated with the goings on. 

 

If you could have one superpower, what would it be? 

To know exactly what people are thinking. 

 

What is your strategy for tackling challenges? 

Just meeting them head-on. The longer any challenges are left, the more difficult they can become. Going through the challenge from start to finish, establishing where the issue is coming from, and then trying to find an alternative way to go about it. If there isn’t, then advising the person you’re having the discussion with that this is the problem, this is where the issue has stemmed from and unfortunately there isn’t any way forward, rather than providing anyone with any false hope. 

 

What is your greatest skill(s), either work- or non-work-related? 

Being able to see any situation from both sides, whether it’s discussing a deal with a broker that has run into an issue at underwriting, or dealing with a personal family issue. I always try to see it from different perspectives and try to find a solution that is to all parties’ satisfaction and, that way, everyone is happy. 

 

And finally, what’s the strangest question you’ve ever been asked? 

When people ask you where you lost something – if we knew where we lost it, it wouldn’t be lost. 





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