Here is the difference in one sentence: your bank can offer you its mortgages, and we can offer you almost everyone's. Blue Sky Mortgage Group is an independent brokerage led by Jensen Tam, licensed by the BC Financial Services Authority, working from River Road in Richmond. The same application you would give one bank gets shopped across chartered banks, credit unions, monoline lenders most people have never heard of, B lenders, and — when a file genuinely needs it — private capital.
Why a Richmond file is its own kind of file
Richmond mortgages come with Richmond questions. Presale condo assignments around Brighouse and Capstan with completion dates that keep moving. Leasehold and co-op buildings that half the big banks quietly decline. Buyers whose income is real but self-employed, paid from a family business, or newly arrived in Canada without two years of NOAs. Homes on larger lots where an appraiser's land-value opinion decides everything. None of this is exotic to us — it is Tuesday. Knowing which lender actually funds which scenario is most of what a local broker is for.
What we handle
- First-time buyer mortgages — incentives, minimum down payment math, and realistic budgets.
- Renewals — the letter your bank sends is an opening offer, not a verdict.
- Refinancing and HELOCs — equity for renovations, consolidation, or investment.
- Self-employed mortgages — stated-income realities without the fairy tales.
- New-to-Canada programs — thin Canadian credit doesn't mean no mortgage.
- Condo and commercial lending.
- Bruised credit and private lending — with a mapped path back to A rates, not a dead end.
Start with today's rates, run numbers on the calculator, or go straight to pre-approval.
How a broker gets paid — plainly
On standard residential files, the lender pays us when the mortgage funds. You pay nothing for the brokering. Where a fee ever applies — mainly private lending and genuinely hard placements — it is disclosed in writing before you sign anything, not discovered at the lawyer's office. That is both a BCFSA rule and the obvious way to keep clients for the second and third mortgage of their lives, which is the actual business model.
What working with us looks like
A conversation first: what you're buying or renewing, what the income picture really is, what the timeline looks like. Then a document list — one list, not a dribble of surprise requests. We place the file where it fits, walk you through the approval's conditions in plain language, and stay on it until funding day. Most of it happens over phone, email and e-signatures; the office on River Road is there when sitting across a table is better.
Questions people ask before their first call
For standard residential mortgages, typically nothing — the lender pays us on funding. Fees only enter the picture on private or hard-to-place files, and they're disclosed in writing before you commit to anything.
Different, mostly. Your bank sells its own shelf; we shop the market. Sometimes your bank does have the best offer — in which case we'll say so and you've lost nothing. See the full bank vs broker comparison.
Richmond is home base; the whole Lower Mainland is the working area. Since most of the process is phone, email and e-signature, where you live rarely changes anything.
With documents ready — income confirmation, down payment source, ID — usually one to two business days. Self-employed and other complex files take longer, and pretending otherwise just moves the delay to a worse moment.