Tanya Du Preez from Affinitas Finance joins Ruan and Marissa to explore what it takes to build a long-term career as a woman in mortgage broking in Australia — and what the industry needs to do differently to attract the next generation.
Building a sustainable women in mortgage broking career in Australia takes more than technical knowledge — it takes confidence, community, and support structures that the industry is still working to get right. In this episode of The LVR Podcast, Ruan Burger and Marissa Schulze sit down with Tanya Du Preez from Affinitas Finance for the third instalment of the Women in Business: Strong and Bold series.
Tanya came to mortgage broking after a corporate career at Deloitte, drawn by the opportunity to have conversations that genuinely moved the dial in people's lives. She was also relatively new to Australia when she started — learning the industry at the same time as learning the country's deep relationship with property. Sixteen years in, she describes the career as anything but static — there's always something new to learn, always new strategies to consider. She also started the business with a three-week-old baby in a carrier at her first client appointment. As Ruan puts it, that says everything about capacity and confidence that words can't quite capture.
Like the women featured in previous episodes of this series, confidence comes up early and often when Tanya talks about the challenges of a women in mortgage broking career in Australia. She observes that women tend to want to know 110% of everything before putting themselves forward, while many of their male counterparts back themselves with far less certainty. Her advice: seek out people who are doing what you want to do, ask for the conversation, and be willing to learn visibly — because that visibility, in turn, helps other women see what's possible for themselves.
The conversation takes an honest turn when Tanya raises a point she acknowledges might be controversial: a lot of the support that women need to build a successful women in mortgage broking career in Australia actually needs to start at home. If the domestic load isn't shared equally, no amount of industry programming will fully close the gap. She credits her husband's genuine partnership at home as one of the foundational reasons she's been able to build the career she has — and acknowledges that her situation is far from universal.
Marissa raises another risk that resonates throughout the series: many women in broking have such a deep desire to serve and please their clients that they overextend themselves to the point of burnout. Tanya shares a reframe that shifted her own thinking — that helping someone more than you should, rather than empowering them, is actually doing them a disservice. That perspective made it easier to set healthy professional boundaries without feeling like she was letting anyone down.
The episode closes with a shared call to action: the industry needs to get into schools and universities, build the profile of broking as a career for young people of all backgrounds, and create the kind of visible, diverse role models that make a women in mortgage broking career in Australia feel genuinely achievable for the next generation.
