This post is inspired by another broker – but not in a good way.
Firstly, just to say – I never slate other brokers. But I thought this was worthy of a post as I think it is important at explaining why a specialist can be better than a generalist.
Back in July one of the lenders ran an event for a few brokers. As ever you have a talk about work and I mentioned how I had recently got a case with some mortgage late payments through with a particular building society at near normal rates.
Mortgage arrears is something we come every now again, not massively so considering we do a lot of adverse! I was a little proud of the result we got.
The problem
The broker I was talking to said “Pepper Money, they will do it.” She said it very confidently – and she is right, they would have done the case.
However, the bits that worried me are:
- I had already mentioned I had managed to get it through at near normal rates (having checked, over 1% lower than Pepper money!).
- She said it with such confidence and had not taken onboard that there were clearly better options.
- She also did not know when the late payments were registered or how many months in arrears.
The only way I describe her approach is to take a sledgehammer to crack a nut. She had already made her mind up about who would accept the case without knowing the details.
The lady would undoubtedly have got it over the line and she might have even looked good to her customer – but she would have also cost them £72 extra per month (or £1,728 over 2 years!).
How it ended
I mentioned to her that I had placed at lower rates than Pepper and her response was “Pepper are good”. At that point I gave up, turned around and started to talk to someone else.
When I got back to the office, I went to check their website just to see if they have mention of adverse. There is not much mention of it bar from their fees. Which I found interesting.
Their standard fees are lower than ours:
No adverse – Us – £500, Them – £395.
Adverse (for this case) – Us £500, Them £495. – I dont really count a late payment as adverse so we ended u charging our standard fee. But even if we had gone to “complex”, we would have charged £750.
We charged £5 more and saved them £1,723. But even worst case scenario we would have still saved them over £1,400.
Fees do not dictate the skill level of the broker. But the fact that we actively do adverse, tells you that we know what we are doing. We move with the times, we do not rely on one case that we did 6 months ago and then tell people that we do adverse.
But as ever, lets have a chat. Get a second opinion and go with who you think will do the best job and get you over the line.