Communication really does appear to be key.
Jonathan Sealey is chief executive of Hope Capital
In a recent survey conducted by Hope Capital, 20% of the brokers who responded said that they felt they didn’t understand the bridging process.
This is quite a shocking statistic, especially as 90% of respondents also said that they expected the level of bridging business they did to increase over the next 12 months.
It really highlights the need for all of us in the bridging industry to do more to communicate with brokers, especially those who may not deal with bridging every day of the week in order to help them achieve this increase.
I’m sure the challenge here lies not with the 12% of brokers who said that bridging formed 60% or more of their business, but the remainder who only have occasional cases.
While I know that both the bridging trade press and packagers do their best to put information out to help make it easier for brokers, it is clear that there are many who neither use a packager or read everything available to them.
Somehow, it is clear that we all need to do more to reach out and work in collaboration.
One of the challenges that many ‘occasional’ bridging brokers must face is that underwriting standards are so different across different lenders; even the ways of working and the information that is required is different so there is no standard for brokers to work from.
This must also account for the 21% of brokers who said that getting approval from lenders causes the most delays in the completion of a loan, while another 15% said that communication with lenders is an issue.
When drilling into this further, all brokers wanted to be able to speak to a decision maker, whether that be an underwriter or a director and fundamentally, wanted to know that when a lender said ‘yes we will lend’, that it meant exactly that.
Communication really does appear to be key – both in lenders letting brokers know what the process is, being clear about what information the broker needs to provide and then in being accessible to talk them through what happens next if needed.
This extra communication appears to be exactly what is needed as 36% of brokers cited collating all information from their client as a barrier in completing the loan.
If a broker had a clearer understanding right at the beginning of the process of what they needed to provide then it would help them to educate their clients and the whole loan process from application to completion should be a lot smoother and vitally, much quicker.
These are things that we try to do at Hope Capital as standard, but it is clear that this needs to happen across the industry in order to provide brokers with the help and support that they so desperately need.
