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A lot of people ask me what a mortgage broker actually does for you. And while it is a straightforward enough answer there are many parts of it that you only realised once you are into the process and working with one.
For a start if you walk directly into a bank and ask for mortgage advice you’re not getting any offerings other than whatever that bank says they have. Banks are only required to give you the mortgage offerings that they provide and in fact the way regulation works it’s not legal for them to advise you on mortgages outside of what they specifically offer.
A good mortgage broker on the other hand will be operating in a firm that has many agencies and this offers you greater choice and selection, so that’s a starting point.
Then when it comes to the actual work involved in getting a mortgage, a person who works in a call centre or branch of a bank will normally only know their own credit criteria – and sadly in some cases they might not know it that well. It is a fair point to say that the most expert mortgage advisors in the country who know the most about all lending across the maximum number of institutions all work in the intermediary channel, namely the mortgage broker space.
When you start making your mortgage application, that’s some of the initial administrative work, and that isn’t really where the mortgage broker will shine. For this they rely on mortgage systems like OnlineApplication which helped gather up all of the documentation and collate it using AI to turn it into a sensible pack for them to examine.
It is at this point that you really start to feel their value – because they will have a more astute understanding of which lender might offer you a mortgage, not only that should it be required they can go to different lenders with your case to do run buys and get a firmer idea of who has an appetite for doing your loan. They do this quickly, if you were to try this on your own you’d be looking at spending many hours to get in front of the right people in each institution and it would be a giant waste of your time.
Something that also happens in mortgages is that all of them are slightly different. You could have two couples made-up of twins who both have partners who are one of the other set of twins and they all work in the same job earning the same amounts and they both have one child per family and want to buy houses next door to one another, that sounds like everything will be the same – but it isn’t.
Maybe one has a car loan and the other doesn’t maybe one family goes into their overdraft regularly and the other one doesn’t, maybe one side of them has more savings than the other maybe one of them does more overtime there is no two mortgage applications that are the same and it is in these finer details that most cases are gotten across the line or fail.
I’d like you to take a look at some of our trustpilot reviews or some of the many Google reviews we get – these are real people talking about the difference that the broker made. If you don’t like our brokerage you can go look at the reviews of other brokerages the point remains the same, a good mortgage broker is a massive asset tear mortgage application. I can’t recall seeing positive reviews about the mortgage process through direct banks.
In the back and forth that inevitably happens on every mortgage application, you’ll want a person who knows how to answer the questions so they don’t derail your mortgage. This could be something simple like clarifying a certain wage payment in the best manner so that it aids your case. Equally it could be ensuring that you don’t scupper your own case in some way by telling the bank something that’s not really relevant but which could damage your credit application.
Over half of the mortgage market in Ireland is now delivered through mortgage brokers – there is a good reason for that – it’s the best way to get a loan, it offers the most selection and choice, and then a world where everybody is encouraged to ‘go direct’, what we actually see is a preference to go impartial with greater choice.
If you are thinking about getting a mortgage, and you might be one of those people who one way or another just really wants to go direct to a lender, then at least do yourself a favour and call a broker (we’d like it to be us!) And see what you make of their offering. See what you make of their commitment to your case or understanding of your situation across multiple lending options.
The other thing that happens in banks is you often get passed from one department to another whereas brokerages tend to have either no department’s, and the same person will deal with you from start to finish, or they have highly simplified structures where the advisor will work with an administrator or two but you’ll always have access to your advisor should you need them.
And that ended nutshell is why people prefer to use mortgage brokers rather than going it alone.
