Every year, CMP publishes the Top 75 Brokers list and every year, the industry does roughly the same thing with it: brokers scan for names they recognize, lenders note who's moving volume, and then the conversation moves on.
That's the wrong way to read this list.
The Top 75 isn't just a leaderboard. It's a compressed data set — 75 broker profiles that, read together, reveal something real about what separates sustainable high performance from the kind that burns out in a rate cycle or two.
I've been watching this list for years. I know several of the brokers on it personally. And this year, we have something to celebrate directly at A Better Way Mortgage Group — so I'll start there before getting to the bigger picture.
Congratulations to Our Own
We are proud to have four members of the A Better Way family recognized on the 2026 CMP Top 75.
Channie Tay has been a cornerstone of this brokerage for years. Her presence on this list is a reflection of what consistent, client-first work looks like over a long horizon. Not one great rate cycle. A career built properly.
Eitan Pinsky, Kyle Green, and Pearl Kwan recently joined A Better Way from the DLC Origin team — and we couldn't be more proud to see them recognized on this list in the same year they made the move. Their calibre speaks for itself. The fact that they chose A Better Way as the platform to do their best work from is something this brokerage doesn't take lightly. We built this place to be a destination for brokers who are serious about their craft. That this group is here, and on this list, tells me we're living up to that.
To all four: this is well-earned. The industry sees you.
What the List Actually Teaches the Rest of Us
Now for the part that's useful to every broker reading this, whether your name is on the list or not.
The brokers who repeat on this list don't compete on rate
This is the most consistent pattern across the Top 75, year after year. The brokers who appear once are often excellent rate-finders who had a great year in a favourable market. The brokers who appear repeatedly have built something different: a reason for a client to call them rather than searching for whoever has the lowest number this week.
That reason is almost never rate. It's expertise in a specific borrower type. It's process. It's the confidence a borrower feels walking through a complicated deal — BFS, rental portfolio, divorce buyout, new-to-Canada — when the broker on the other side has seen it a hundred times and knows exactly which lenders will look at it.
Rate is a commodity. Expertise in a specific problem isn't.
Volume follows clarity, not hustle
There's a persistent mythology in the broker community that the highest-volume brokers are the ones who are grinding hardest — more calls, more leads, more hours. The Top 75 data doesn't really support that story.
What you see instead is a high degree of clarity about who they serve and what problem they solve. Their referral partners know exactly what to send them. Their clients know exactly what they're buying. There's no ambiguity about positioning.
Hustle without clarity is just churn. The top of this list has clarity.
The best brokers have a lender strategy, not just lender relationships
Every broker in this industry claims to have "great lender relationships." What the high performers actually have is more specific: they know which lender to approach first for a given borrower profile before they pick up the phone.
The rental income spectrum. The BFS income treatment. The new-to-Canada programs. The monolines that price aggressively on insured and pull back on uninsured. These brokers have mapped the lender landscape with enough precision that they're rarely surprised mid-deal. That precision is what turns a 60-day file into a 21-day close.
Referral network depth beats referral network width
Broad shallow referral networks produce unpredictable pipelines. Deep narrow ones — two or three accountants who genuinely trust you with their best clients, a realtor team that has watched you perform under pressure — produce consistent pipelines.
The brokers on this list have, broadly, chosen depth. They are genuinely indispensable to a small group of referring professionals rather than vaguely known to a large one.
The Bigger Picture
The 2026 list reflects an industry that is quietly maturing. Rate volatility over the last three years shook out brokers who were riding a trend and didn't have the depth to survive the turn. The brokers still standing — and topping this list — built businesses that could absorb the unexpected.
That's the blueprint. Not the volume numbers. Not the rankings. The how behind the numbers.
Congratulations again to Channie, Eitan, Kyle, and Pearl — and to every broker on the 2026 CMP Top 75. You've earned the recognition. The industry is watching, and this year's list gave us all something worth learning from.