Gitika Merani Gets Indians Into Homes in Sydney

Gitika Merani is the Director and Principal Mortgage Broker at Your Finance Network in Sydney – but the path to that title is not a straight line. It runs through architecture school in Pune, a cross-continental move for love, a credential crisis, a design firm, a furniture estimating job, a baby, a pandemic, and one question from her husband that changed the entire frame.

She grew up in a household steeped in property and banking. Her father spent forty years in real estate in Pune – the business is still there – and her mother ran the loans department at a bank. Despite that background, Gitika went in a different direction. She trained as an architect, worked with leading firms in Pune, and started her own practice. Then she got married and moved to Sydney to be with her husband Naveen, who had migrated as a child and is, as she puts it, “more Aussie than Desi.” She arrived twelve years ago on a tourist visa, had six months to settle in and explore, and then hit her first real wall: her architecture degree was not recognized in Australia.

After five or six years of study and another few years of professional practice, she would have had to start over from scratch. She chose a different route. She launched Design Mantra, a small interior design firm, and built an Australian portfolio one project at a time – including designing Indian restaurants in Harris Park, Sydney’s Indian precinct. That work led to a role at Harvey Norman Commercial as an estimator, working with numbers on large-scale fit-outs for schools and hotels. Close to the built environment, but not quite where she had trained to be.

Then came the baby. Then came COVID. She was classified as an essential worker, returned to the job when her son Mahir was only eight months old, and spent a year navigating one of Sydney’s hardest lockdowns while leaving a very young child at home every day. Her mental health, she says plainly, was “all over the place.” She eventually quit, with Naveen’s support.

He asked her one question, and that was that. What was your end goal as an architect? Getting people into their homes. What would your end goal be as a mortgage broker? Same answer. “It’s the same goal. You’re just choosing a different path.” She did her Certificate IV, worked as a loan processor to learn the industry from the inside – doing data entry, understanding the ropes, not skipping steps – and then started Your Finance Network at the end of 2021. Four years in, the business has grown organically almost entirely through referrals. She has not needed to pitch for work in over a year.

A large portion of her client base comes from the Indian and South Asian community in Sydney, and she understands exactly why. There is a cultural inheritance around property ownership – “apna ghar hona chahiye,” as she puts it – that means Indian migrants arrive with the goal already in mind, even when they do not know how to navigate the Australian system. She helps them understand what is actually available: first homeowner grants, purchases with as little as 2 to 5 percent deposit, equity extraction, guarantor arrangements. The myths and fears around property investment, the mechanics of negative gearing, the path from renting to owning to building a portfolio – this is the territory she works in every day.

One client story she will not forget: a single mother who had been forced to move three times in two years because her rentals kept being taken back. She needed her own place. Gitika walked her through the whole process, got her a pre-approval, went with her to auction, watched her win. There were complications after the exchange, but they got through it. The client invited Gitika to her housewarming and introduced her to everyone as the person who got her into her home. “I felt so embarrassed,” Gitika says. “But I was so humbled.”

Last year, Naveen left Westpac after eleven years – the last stretch of which was spent coaching five to six hundred mortgage brokers as a BDM for third-party broking – and joined Your Finance Network. He handles the complex end: commercial loans, SMSF lending, intricate structures. She handles residential. They both have their own broking codes. “I’m still the boss,” she says. She also means it. They are building out the back office with support staff in India, which she describes as exactly the kind of arrangement she has always wanted – one foot in each country, both economies benefiting.

They have two children: Mahir, whose name means expert and who has fully taken that on, and Ivara, whose name in Sanskrit means a gift of God – and who, by Gitika’s account, brought the business a change of luck when she arrived last year. Naveen joined shortly after.

This conversation started with a small discovery: Gitika and my sister Akanksha went to school together at St. Mary’s in Pune. Gitika had been following my work since India, recognized the name, put the pieces together. Her former classmates were apparently watching her Instagram story the morning we recorded and messaging her: “Do you know that’s Akanksha’s sister?” I did not know this going in. It is one of those connections that makes you realize the world is a very specific size.

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