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Long wait times

Journalist: Jake Carter, Mortgage Introducer

ended 01. August 2023

Brokers are getting very frustrated that they have had to wait for around 30 minutes, sometimes more than an hour, to speak to lenders, according to broker forum cherry.

Is this something you have experienced?

How does this impact a transaction?

What would you like to see done to speed things up?

5 responses from the Newspage community

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Stephen Perkins
Managing Director at Yellow Brick Mortgages
Long wait times to speak to lenders is not a new problem, it has been around for a while. What is more frustrating is that often when you do finally get to speak to someone they cannot do anything to help or just copy and paste information from their criteria.
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Darryl Dhoffer
Founder at The Mortgage Geezer
First and foremost, as a broker, know the lender's criteria. I hear so many times of many brokers wasting valuable time on hold with lenders on information they should know already. Go through the correct channels - use your BDMS, contact the lender on non-peak times, and where you can use lenders' AI-assisted chatbots for common questions.
More importantly, be prepared, and make sure you have all relevant information, and documents to hand, when you do speak with a lender...nothing more frustrating than not having a document or piece of information a lender needs when you do finally get through to the lender. If you can, and able to, employ a mortgage administrator, to help take this burden away from you, as we all know how frustrating this can be. Just subtle changes to our operations could reduce wait times.
More importantly report any issues you have with your BDM, as the more of us, that voice an opinion it might ensure lenders make changes (pfft) - ever the optimist me
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Scott Taylor-Barr
Principal Adviser at Barnsdale Financial Management
It is the bane of all brokers' lives, especially given the choice of some lenders hold music, but given that the lowest cost lender is likely to be getting the lion's share of business from all brokers at the same time, it's something of a self-fulfilling prophecy given the levels of business they will then be dealing with. I wouldn't want to give lenders too much grief, as their answer to this issue would likely be more frequent rate pulls with even less notice than we get now, to keep service levels acceptable. If I could ask for anything to help the situation it would be decent, uninterrupted hold music; if you're going to make me wait then play me something decent and stop interrupting it to tell me my call "is important to us", please.
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Rhys Schofield
Brand Director at Peak Mortgages and Protection
I think someone needs to show the lenders how averages work. It seems that some of them consistently don't have the staff or systems to keep up with demand and have just changed their message blaming COVID for long waits.
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Peter Stamford
Mortgage Expert at Stamford Home Finance
"Please hold, we are experiencing higher-than-average call volumes" Can someone explain to lenders that you can't have this playing 100% of the time. That's not how averages work!
The solution, ring-back, already exists it just needs to be implemented effectively so that brokers will trust it.