Legal & General's Director of Housing said: "Business forecasts amongst our mortgage network advisers are looking up, with over half of them expecting business to get better over the next three months. This has doubled from just 27% who were positive before Christmas. The low point for confidence was Q3 last year when 45% of advisers expected business to get worse over the coming three months. This dropped to 33% in Q4 and then to 16% in this report.
"Our mortgage network advisers are also more confident about forthcoming protection sales, with 62% saying that they expect sales to get better over the next quarter compared to just 36% at the end of last year. Protection continues to be a valuable revenue stream for advisers and providers are pulling out all the stops to help advisers grow their business.
"The expectations of house purchase business over the next quarter are a bit more evenly spread in this survey, suggesting that buyers might be slowly coming back to the market. Certainly, there have been reports of more buyer interest from various organisations, including RICS. Some commentators have also predicted that we may well see the bottom of the market soon.
"If the Government's attempts to pump money into the system are successful, and if the supply of credit starts to catch up with demand, then we could potentially be seeing a halt to the declining housing market this side of Christmas. This prompts the question, ‘are we nearly there yet?'
"When the market stops declining lenders will be looking to rebuild market share and intermediaries and distributors will be a crucial part of this. For those that can ‘hang on in there', the opportunities will be significant."
