Four-day working week

If mortgage activity picks up, I believe lenders would struggle to keep up with processing cases if their underwriters only worked 80% of the week. They would need to hire more underwriters who are limited in supply thus pushing up wages and increasing costs.  There is more chance of getting a 5-year fix for less than 2% than the mortgage industry implementing the 4-day week.

No chance would not work in the business we are in as advisors the majority of sole practitioner/advisors work 5 days a week, and even that may not be enough unless you have multiple staff in place before even considering reducing working days and for a lender, it would be a nightmare as processing for some takes long enough as it is, but something that has to be looked at from a business prospective is how many staff would you need to allow a 4 day working week to allow efficiency or does every just work 12 hour days for the 4 days they are in.

At the moment it does feel like you need to work 6 or 7 days a week just to support clients at this difficult time! If mortgage lenders provided us with enough notice on product changes, then this could work in our industry. But with most lenders providing less than 24 hours' notice before any change, this could be very difficult to implement. Having adequate admin support to cover those other days would be great to have, but the cost of providing this would probably be counterproductive, and just add to the ever-increasing cost of running a business.