Brokers and what makes their blood boil

"My biggest bugbear is the difficulty getting mortgage deals over the line. People either can't borrow enough, or are overstretching themselves financially to get a mortgage because prices are so crazily high. This madness has to stop. The housing market is in an unsustainable bubble that will soon burst. That may be the only crumb of comfort for young people trying to get on the ladder."

"Nothing annoys me more than stack them high and sell them cheap legal services, with inadequately trained, over-worked and under-paid legal assistants juggling skyscraper high caseloads. The clients are suffering poor service, the caseworkers are suffering mental breakdowns, and advisers are having to go way beyond their natural remit to get deals through. Yet fat cat law firms continue to line their pockets while damaging the reputation of the whole legal community."

"For me the biggest frustration right now is the constant withdrawal of rates at short notice. While I know the reasons lenders do it, I feel that the real world consequence of it gets forgotten. If a lender announces they will withdraw rates at 3pm, with all applications to be with them by 10pm that evening (and that's quite a generous timescale in all honesty at the moment), the result is brokers up and down the land cancelling their evenings to chase up and submit any cases they have for that lender. That means cancelling time with their family, missing their children's parents evening, or not going to that theatre show they had tickets for. The alternative is spending the next few days re-sourcing all of those deals and having to approach new lenders, as well as having to tell clients that the rate and mortgage payment we've all been discussing has now changed, and not for the better."

"The pandemic and its aftermath have shone a light onto the creaky parts of the mortgage process. Currently, we have a top five lender unable to respond to a new application in the first 12 working days, another lender whose SLA for sending an email is 5 days and a third whose SLA for loading the offer to the legal system is 8 working days. In an active market, these all cause clients significant stress. We need the industry as a whole to invest in the technology that makes any manual turnarounds a thing of the past. The legacy systems need replacing and a new wave of inovation brought in. We are a multi-billion industry with a fabulous product used by nearly all homeowners at some point, but we need to up our game before someone new comes in and eats our lunch."

“The inability of some lenders to answer a phone and sort out situations that would take 5 minutes on the blower but extends to weeks playing email tennis is the first. The second has to be conveyancing; what takes so long? I've got cases that should be open and shut, yet it always feels like a solicitor would rather pick up a snake than the phone. Thirdly, can lenders please stop removing products with a few seconds' notice; we know it's a tricky time with money markets bouncing around faster than Boris can get to his parties; however, the stress level it creates is unbearable. Finally, and perhaps the biggest frustration of the job is (and I suspect you could do a poll on this, and it would win) getting documents in the right format from customers, particularly bank statements. Again, it's not the customers' fault, I hasten to add; banking apps have become the mainstay, and so many banks apps don't have the ability to download and send statements from them, which causes all sorts of issues that could be avoided.”