NEWCASTLE Building Society has signed up its first buy-to-let customer to a new subsidiary set up to provide mortgage processing services for other financial providers.
Market expertise and strong relationships with national house builders and developers means POD has an extensive range of properties to purchase and let, which it offers to a large client base of high net-worth investors looking to acquire multi-million pound residential property portfolios.
As part of the new agreement POD can now facilitate highly competitive buy-to-let mortgages for its clients from a range of specialist lenders via the NMSL panel.
To ensure a smooth and efficient service NMSL will also process these mortgages.
Angus Macnaughton, the managing director of NMSL, said: "We have invested considerable time and resources in diversifying around our core skills, such as mortgage broking, call centre services, product development, Internet-based solutions and mortgage processing. In simple terms we now offer our increased efficiency and capacity to other financial service providers, which is a rapidly growing market.
"Mortgage processing has been one of the most successful arms of this diversification strategy, and we are delighted to have secured our first partnership agreement. We believe this will lead to similar processing deals in the future."
Wendy Dowling, the managing director of Portfolios of Distinction, said: "The buy-to-let market is still buoyant and set to grow to some 20% of the UK property market by 2020 as predicted by ARLA. Our partnership with NMSL, with its expertise and experience in processing, is therefore an extremely exciting development.
"We are finding that many clients want to have a property portfolio of quality properties to provide long-term income and capital growth. The most important issue to them is control over their assets, in the era of dwindling final salary pension schemes and with some schemes closing all together."
NMSL is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Newcastle Building Society, the largest building society based in the North-East and one of the strongest mutuals in the UK. It has more than 800 staff and assets in excess of £3.3 billion.
