Cheering for the home team

If you’ve been watching anything of the Winter Olympics you can’t have failed to have seen the bizarre and captivating images of the cheerleading squad from North Korea.

Related topics:  Mortgages
Nicola Firth | Knowledge Bank
12th March 2018
Nicola Firth Knowledge Bank
"Lenders have introduced a variety of criteria conditions that sit behind the headline rate and can be difficult to see and hear above a headline rate screaming for attention. "

They arrived in their hundreds to support the unified North/South Korean team. Their perfectly choreographed routines are almost hypnotic and performed with an energy and enthusiasm that has left many people, myself included, more interested in them than the team they’re supporting. For those that don’t know, while the squad were cheering and singing with fixed smiles for the entire game their team was comprehensively beaten 8-0.

The lesson to be learnt from this? The team with the big, brash support isn’t necessarily the best one!

The same principle can be applied in the mortgage sector.

Product providers quite rightly get behind their products with promotions, publicity and headline grabbing rates. They’ve designed and launched a market leading product and they want the world to know about it. Sadly the consequence for many brokers is a client coming to see them with a best buy table printed off the internet and clutched proudly under their arm enquiring about a product that they simply don’t qualify for.

This used to be a fairly simple conversation for a broker to have because the conditions were fairly straightforward. In most cases if you could fit within the LTV range the product could be yours.

However, we don’t live in that world any longer. Products aren’t put in silos based just on LTV or any other single factor anymore. Lenders have introduced a variety of criteria conditions that sit behind the headline rate and can be difficult to see and hear above a headline rate screaming for attention.

That is why an emotionally void (sorry system, I love you really) search solution is so valuable, and so treasured by regulators. It separates the product from the promotion.

There is often a chasm between the product the client wants and the one that they qualify for and so it is crucial that this is dealt with in the first instance. Brokers know how frustrating it is to proceed with an application only to find out later that the client does not fit within the criteria. However frustrating this is for brokers the impression it leaves with the client is the real issue.

If a broker has to change products or restart the application process then the impression to the client is one of unprofessionalism. Clients rely on brokers to steer them through the mortgage process and to be told that they don’t qualify for the product they applied for raises the logical, reasonable and painful question; “why did we apply for it then?”.

There are over 40,000 individual criteria on our system and so it’s obvious that a broker can’t possibly keep up to date with this information. The upside? Simply that using a criteria search system at the outset means that the client isn’t taken down a product path that will ultimately be a dead-end. 

Your system isn’t cheering for any particular team which is a good thing. All it cares about is making sure that you end up with the win!

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