Which states are seeing the strongest financial adviser firm sales?
The purchase of financial firms is varying by state with strong demand in Western Australia.
Speaking to Money Management, John Birt, chief executive at Radar Results, said his firm was expecting to see record deals this year.
This was helped by advisers looking to exit the industry and efficiencies brought about by being able to communicate on Zoom.
Looking at states, Birt said there was strong demand in Western Australia but hardly any in South Australia. New South Wales (NSW) and Queensland also had good demand.
“We have never had so many sales in Western Australia, anything we have gets purchased quickly, including large businesses. We need more sellers and are trying to find more.
“We don’t have much in Adelaide, that has always been the case for some reason, and have a higher than usual amount in NSW and Queensland.
“This is our biggest-ever year for purchases, helped by the efficiencies of the business. Since the pandemic, we can do double the number of meetings we used to do because of Zoom. We used to do three a day, usually in person, and now we can have 6-8 per day.”
The advent of Zoom had also encouraged firms to consider buying firms interstate as they no longer needed to conduct business face-to-face.
“We are doing more interstate deals than we used to. People think a buyer wouldn’t be interested if they were from a different state but that isn’t the case.
“Clients can now be serviced interstate and they might not need to have a local adviser anymore. The clients don’t seem to mind so long as they are still being serviced properly – it doesn’t matter if it isn’t face-to-face,” he said.
Reasons for advisers to sell up included reluctance to sit the financial adviser exam or complete a graduate qualification, repeatedly failing the exam or being tired of the regulation involved in running a practice. This included smaller single-person licensees where it was too costly for an adviser to run a business by themselves.
AUTHOR
Laura Dew
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