The intermediaries’ share of the mortgage market has been in decline since 2007 and this is against a back-drop of the public’s faith in banks being at an all-time low.
However once the MMR changes have taken place in April 2014 far more emphasis will be placed on ensuring borrowers get proper mortgage advice.
Intermediaries are best placed to maximise this change as only an intermediary can search out products from multiple lenders and only intermediaries have access to products from specialist lenders like us.
Buy-to-let
Take a look at the buy-to-let market for example. Here’s a sector that has been growing at a much faster rate than mainstream mortgages over the last few years.
This is as a result of the lack of supply of housing coupled with the ongoing challenges in the mainstream mortgage market.
Despite this sectors growth in demand there has been no product innovation from the industry and the same type of buy-to-let products are still on offer now as we had five years ago.
At Precise Mortgages not only do we have a no minimum income policy we also have just introduced into our core range an increase in the maximum loan size to £1 million and removed the cap on the properties held with other lenders. We don’t stop here however, we are also changing our rental calculation in the near future which will significantly reduce the rental yield required as well as reviewing the pricing structure.
Cascading
We’ve identified that a growing population of landlords want to increase their portfolio of properties but have often been turned down by the main buy-to-let lenders for relatively minor reasons such as having a less than perfect credit history or a credit score that does not fit. More often than not these landlords are perfectly good borrowers who have survived the downturn with only minor issues. Our product cascading system can help. Not only is it easy to use, it’s quick too and only takes a matter of minutes to complete. Simply enter the borrower’s details into the system and you will be instantly presented with the cheapest products available for your customer’s profile.
Rather than getting a straight decline which means rekeying and re-sourcing, there is a chance that another product is available, saving you a lot of time and effort. Of course, like all lenders we sometimes say no, but you can be safe in the knowledge that our system will have searched our entire product range and will only decline if we have to, keep in mind we have a wider product range than virtually any other buy-to-let lender.
We appreciate that if we just cascaded down that wouldn’t be particularly impressive, but, in fact many intermediaries have been surprised that their customers have been cascaded up into a cheaper product than they expected, often explained by the fact that missed payments on unsecured credit are allowed. The system is designed to always present the cheapest products based on your individual customer’s circumstances so even if you think your customer won’t qualify it is worth spending only a few minutes inputting their details to see if we can help. What’s more, we pay the same proc fee regardless of which buy-to-let product is selected and because we only leave a soft footprint there is no damage to the borrower’s credit file, irrespective of whether the decision is an accept or a decline.
Our product ranges are available only to intermediaries and our product cascading means that we will say yes more often and we will save you time and effort with our instant decisions.
