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It is quite common for home loan lenders or mortgage providers to distribute their loans through different ‘channels’ (or routes to market). Typically they might have a branch channel, these are buildings that you walk into with their name above the door, and you can speak to somebody at the counter. They will also have telephone call centres or people who are on the road and this is described as the ‘direct channel’. Internet channels are common, ad some group that in with ‘direct’ others classify it separately as ‘internet’, and the majority of lenders will also have another channel which is called the intermediary channel or the broker channel to you and me. The people who work in it are referred to as mortgage brokers.
PTSB gets most of their distribution through this channel of intermediaries who offer a more impartial form advice that you get from going directly to a bank. It’s important to note that if you walk into a bank and ask them ‘are your mortgage rates the best’, they’ll probably just say they are ‘competitive’ (which means nothing). In financial services if you don’t advise on a product the standard regulatory practice is that you can’t discuss the product because you don’t have sufficient knowledge to offer advice with.
One think a banker will never tell you…
This is why you’ll never walk into a bank and hear them tell you ‘Oh, Bank ABC down the street offer a far better deal than we do’.
So if PTSB do the majority of their lending through brokers, so how do mortgage brokers work with them? Simply put they hold the thing called an agency, and a mortgage broker with an agency with PTSB is allowed to submit cases to PTSB on your behalf – assuming you have signed all of the relevant release forms.
the advantage of using a broker is simple they can tell you where the best deal exists for the agencies that they hold the only limiting factor here is that different brokers hold different agencies some who are members of mortgage broker specific organizations like the Irish mortgage advisors would hold all of the relevant agencies others might be more like a tide agent with only one or two so this is an important question to ask your mortgage broker
Brokers work to your advantage.
if your mortgage broker determines that the best mortgage for you is with permanent TSB they will put together your application and send it to them. Many banks or lenders have very sophisticated online systems that brokers use to submit their cases permanent TSB is not one of them and for this reason their response time tends to be slower than the other mainstream lenders.
The biggest advantage here is that the broker will always be in your corner, and if it turns out that a far better deal comes to light, they can shift you from permanent TSB to a different provider, again this is something a bank can never do for you.
When a submits your mortgage application it will typically get loaded up onto the PTSB system, and if it is at a sufficient level of completion then it will be looked at by a person who’s called an underwriter. A mortgage underwriter is a person who assesses your loan and determines if it fits the PTSB credit criteria, and if it does then they will give an indication of how much they will lend to you, if it doesn’t they will typically reject the application and provide the broker with the reason for why it can’t proceed.
Understand that underwriters are not on your side (at least not the way a mortgage broker is)
This is an important point, you could have good affordability and believe that you should qualify for a certain amount of a mortgage loan, but the underwriter doesn’t view the case from your perspective, they view it from an internal perspective. And their job is to put the most negative light on that case that they can in order to make the most prudent lending decision possible. This is another reason why having a mortgage broker is good, they know the strengths of your case that a person on their own doing this for the first time might not realise, and it can be all of the difference between you getting a mortgage with PTSB or not.
PTsb have been going through a lot of changes in recent years, closing branches and trying to right size their operations, recently in the news it was disclosed that they are for sale and different firms are looking closely at buying them. It is likely that when that process completes that the purchaser will want to downsize permanent TSB even further, and for that reason you can expect a modernization in their IT systems, because this is one of the only things they can do to catch up with the other lenders in the marketplace while right sizing their headcount.
We <3 PTsb
We have long been a supporter of permanent TSB, they are a solid lender who has been in the Irish market for a long time, they often come out with quite innovative products, they have cash back on their home loans and cash back on some of their banking products if you take out certain types of accounts with them and meet the terms and conditions associated with those accounts.
For this reason they remain a popular lender with brokers, but the main thing you must do is ensure that you are getting advice that is not tied to 1 institution, and if you are dealing with a broker this is something you should ask early on. The simple reason is that if they only deal with one institution it’s no different than walking into a bank, whereas if they are more impartial oriented you will have a selection of options in the market that you wouldn’t get otherwise.
In fact a lesser known reality of the market is that about 1/3 of it can’t even be accessed unless you go through a broker because there are so many lenders that are broker only or who have broker channels within their institution that the public can’t easily reach directly.
If you want to consider permanent TSB as a lender you can speak to us about them, of course we can advise you on loans from many other lenders too, with our guarantee that we will always advise you on whatever the best set of options is based on your criteria documentation and affordability.
If you are based anywhere in Ireland we are able to do mortgage applications for you using our online system we have clients from cork to Donegal and Galway to Dublin we serve the whole country irish mortgage brokers is a brokerage for everybody so get in touch if you have any questions and you want to own a home one day and need a mortgage in order to do it
