Several anonymous sources told Mortgage Introducer that AR numbers at Legal & General had been haemorrhaging since the beginning of 2007, with around 130 AR firms leaving the network in the first quarter of the year.
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It was claimed there was a feeling that the larger firms held a more important position at Legal & General than the smaller brokerages and a prevailing sense that the company was not proactively keeping pace with the developments in the mortgage industry.
One source said: “One of the main reasons for the AR losses is that Legal & General seems not to be looking after firms because of the corporate bureaucracy. It used to stick smaller firms into umbrella accounts and that meant if the large umbrella firms left, the network automatically lost the smaller brokerages as well and the smaller firms get hacked off. I think a lot of the volume it is writing may be coming from the directly authorised side.”
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However, Stephen Smith, director of housing for Legal & General, flatly refuted the claims.
He said: “There is no truth in this. The fact is we haven’t lost large numbers of firms and have roughly the same number of sellers as we did at the beginning of the year. We have also had record levels of satisfaction from our members in our internal survey, the last of which was in February and is done twice a year. Smaller firms are just as important to us as larger firms and we wouldn’t get very far if we didn’t think so.”
