According to Mortgage Brain, the improved insights will grant the ability to determine which areas of the market may represent an opportunity and understand how they are performing against their peers in the industry.
The anonymised information allows lenders to delve into all product changes that have taken place in the past 24 hours to 30 days, the most popular broker searches ‒ which can be broken down by region ‒ and a comparison of search volumes. The information is available for both residential and buy-to-let products and the reports can be exported enabling additional modelling to be undertaken.
The new and improved insights offering provides lenders with far more options when drilling down into this data, allowing them to search by criteria, category or topic. Results will show details of the total searches, as well as the proportion of searches it accounts for, while users will even be able to access the granular detail of how many clicks a single piece of criteria has had from the mortgage brokers using Criteria Hub to help identify appropriate lenders for their clients.
This level of information can be enormously valuable for lenders considering amendments to their criteria, highlighting which specific criteria are most in-demand from brokers and their clients. For example, between January and March, the criteria ‘applicants on furlough’ was searched for on Criteria Hub more than 8,000 times, leading to more than 16,500 clicks, while the topic of self-employment has had over 20,000 searches over the same time period.
Neil Wyatt, sales and marketing director at Mortgage Brain, said: “The lender insights service is a fantastic offering, providing lenders with unparalleled levels of data about criteria changes across the market and trends among broker searches. This information is invaluable for lenders, allowing them to identify where there may be an opportunity to adjust their own lending strategy. Ultimately brokers and borrowers are the big beneficiaries, as it means that lenders are able to adapt and fill those gaps in the market, ensuring that borrowers enjoy far more options irrespective of why they need a mortgage.”
