"It's gravity-defying, " says Mark Bourke, deputy chief executive of IFG Group. "Year in, year out we budget for flat or even decreasing mortgage demand and year in, year out we're seeing bigger volumes and bigger ticket sizes."

IFG occupies an unusual niche, acting as a go-between in the space separating the country's 10 mortgage lenders from the hundreds of independent brokers who account for a growing share of the 16bn worth of home loans sold each year.

The business has been a nice little earner, giving IFG a 13.3m windfall two years ago when it sold a half-share to GE Money in a deal that Bourke helped put together.

The money was badly needed at a time when IFG was struggling with huge debts.

Having weathered bad times, is the group worried that its recovery will be derailed when the mortgage market inevitably runs out of steam? Bourke says the answer will depend on how quickly the group can react when the slowdown comes.

"The secret is to keep costs variable as much as possible.

We employ fewer people in our mortgage business than we did at the start of 2005 even though the volume of business has increased to 1.4bn from 1bn the previous year."

IFG is focused on home owners, who will always need somewhere to live, rather than investors, who are more likely to desert property when returns start to slide.

"Our business is very much bread and butter stuff, firsttime buyers with an average ticket size of 180,000 190,000, " says Bourke. "It's very well spread and supported by demographics."

IFG's mix of business is also undergoing subtle changes.

Instead of house buying, more people are simply topping up their existing mortgages, either to pay off more expensive debts or to finance other investments. Switching lenders is also on the increase as home owners jump between banks in search of a better deal. Bourke says remortgaging now accounts for about 45% of the business, up from 30% in the space of a few years.

IFG is also branching into new areas. It pioneered title insurance in Ireland, doing away with the need for a borrower's ownership of a property to be verified every time the mortgage is topped up or switched to another lender.

IFG has also dipped its toes in the so-called non-conforming mortgage market through the joint venture with GE Money. These are premium-priced home loans for people turned down by mainstream lenders, either because their earnings are irregular or their credit records are blemished by problems in the past.

The next move is expected to target older people who want to release some equity from their homes to supplement their pensions or for other purposes. IFG is believed to be on the brink of finalising a deal with Sentinel, a New Zealand player that specialises in this form of finance, although Bourke refuses to be drawn on the details.

However, he makes no secret of IFG's desire to play a much bigger role in the life and pensions market, which remains in the hands of hundreds of brokers up and down the country, many of them struggling to come to terms with the tough compliance regime being imposed by the Financial Regulator.

Bourke believes these brokers could improve their game by uniting under the IFG umbrella, which could provide them with the same product, compliance and technological back-up that it gives to mortgage brokers.

"It would be a perfect complement to our mortgage business because anybody who needs a mortgage also needs advice on the rest of their financial affairs, " he says. "We've already got a strong group pensions and individual advisory business but it only exists within these walls. The obvious next step is to franchise this expertise in the same way as we've done on the mortgage side."

Without outside support, brokers will see more of their business scooped up by big name wealth managers such as Derek Quinlan, he says.

"Why does Quinlan or Bank of Ireland Private Banking win your clients? It's because you're not able to deliver all of the product options on your own; you're not sophisticated enough to service all of your client's financial planning needs."

Bourke is a relative newcomer to a group that is still identified strongly with its 57-year-old founder and chief executive, Richard Hayes. A former tax adviser who spent four years with PricewaterhouseCoopers in California, Bourke joined IFG as finance director after returning to Ireland in 2001.

"I saw a highly acquisitive company that had transformed itself and its market capitalisation. Only when I joined did it become apparent that this wasn't going to be an easy job. When I arrived the share price was at 1.90 and six months later they went to 3.70. Then the curtains came down."

The root of the problem was a 128m debt mountain, much of it accumulated through a string of UK acquisitions that started to turn sour once the earn-out period was over.

Over the next two years, Bourke helped supervise IFG's turnaround, selling off assets and retreating to those businesses the group was good at. The debt has now been brought down to under 30m and, for the first time in many years, all of the individual business units were in the black in the last quarter.

"Some 100m of the debt burden is gone, profits are rising and no part of the business is loss making, " he says.

"We've got the ability to start growing again but only in those areas where we've already got the expertise."