"It will destroy years of broker-lender goodwill"
Just Mortgages has warned that a return to dual pricing would hurt the goodwill built between brokers and lenders over more than a decade.
The broker firm has reacted to feedback from its team that some lenders are reintroducing dual pricing. This is where lenders undercut the products they offer borrowers via brokers, to clients already introduced to them by the same intermediaries.
According to Just Mortgages, the practice fell out of favour more than 10 years ago when lenders recognised that they needed to work with, and not against brokers.
The business benefits of this included the professional presentation of a packaged case, liaising with brokers regarding service levels, and the ability to launch and pull products quickly by communicating this to the market via the intermediary community.
“This really does feel like a return of the bad old days when there was conflict rather than co-operation between lenders and brokers,” said John Philips (pictured), national operations director at Just Mortgages.
“Over the past decade, brokers and lenders have worked so incredibly hard to develop terrific partnerships and mutually beneficial relationships and to throw that away to avoid paying a fee for professionally introduced business seems very short-sighted.”
Philips stressed that the majority of mortgages in the UK were arranged through brokers and said he believed that any lender introducing dual pricing would suffer a backlash.
“Perhaps these rumours are just rumours, but if they are not, then I’m struggling to understand why a lender would want to be known as ‘anti-broker’ as that is exactly what will happen if they go down a dual pricing route,” he added.
