Speaking on the podcast, Rory Joseph, Founding Director of JLM Mortgage Network, said:
“If you’ve got an estate agent expecting a 4 or 6 week exchange and a lender that is so up against things that it isn’t able to open an email or look at post for a month, then obviously those two expectations are hugely out of kilter so that’s an education piece we need to give to clients. We are working in strange, unprecedented times. At the moment we think a challenging completion date on a new purchase, without much of a chain, is this Christmas and this is not normal. We need to deal with a lot of expectations. The problem is that a lot of the other stakeholders, in particular the estate agents are trying to drive things to fit their traditional timeframes and they are no longer valid.”
Alex Hammond, Director of the Mortgage Market Alliance, added:
“As an industry, should we be doing more to manage expectations outside the industry – with new home builders, developers, estate agents – those are the people who are ultimately going to be putting pressure on to move quickly, when we can all see from within the industry that there’s a reason why this is happening?”
Rob Jupp, CEO at The Brightstar Group, replied: “I think so. That would be very useful. I think the average intermediary today is probably more stressed than at any point in the last decade. They’ve spent the first chunk of the year being worried about their future, working from home in an unusual environment, as I know the rest of the population has as well. Then in the months when they’re used to going on a family holiday, they have been busier than they have ever been, so they’ve got massive pipelines of business and the expectation of trying to deliver on that.
"And lenders have also got massive pipelines of business with staff, more often than not, working from home taking two or three or four times longer to get things through. In addition to that, they’ve got the estate agent they work with, or the new homes developer that they’re contracted to, or the lawyer who’s referred the business, with the same level of expectations that these are magicians who can create mortgage offers out of thin air. We are almost guilty of making a rod for our own back, because the average mortgage intermediary does deliver and sort it out, but at the moment they can’t.”
