All we have to do now is charm consumers
Posted on November 14th 2011
There are a number of reasons to be positive about the mortgage market at the moment, although you have to look hard to find them.
There was £362bn gross lending at the peak of the mortgage market back in 2007 and at that time there were 25,000 brokers actively selling mortgages that works out at about 145 completions per broker per year.
So let’s say that next year is going to be flat and we do £125bn. The consensus is that there are about 8,000 brokers active in the mortgage industry that works out at 156 completions per broker per year, which is about 8% better than 2007.
The market has now right-sized itself to the new volumes. Therefore, it should be perfectly reasonable to assume that average broker income for those still in the market should be comparable with the peak.
We published statistics last week showing that the number of products available to brokers now exceeds that of direct-only deals, so clearly product providers are favouring intermediaries once more.
The job we now need to do is to let customers know that the broker market is the place to go if they want product choice.
Unfortunately, our data also shows that customers tend to think about high street banks before they think about a broker.
So it’s clear that we still have a fair bit of work to do on the PR front.
