The days of sitting back and waiting for the business to fly through the door are well and truly over.
The well-worn phrase by Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister in the late 1950s of ‘You’ve never had it so good’ was certainly true in the early part of the new millennium for the mortgage industry.
However the past few years have re-affirmed that this message resides in the past and it is important that brokers realise that the level of those ‘good’ times might never be reached again.
This isn’t casting more doom and gloom on the market, it is fact. There is little point in putting your head in the sand or placing your fingers in your ears singing ‘la, la, la’ and hoping everything will go away.
This is the time to focus, take a step back and take a good, long look at business models and how to make the most of relationships in the current financial environment.
This means that there is an even greater emphasis on service quality and adding value to propositions in today’s marketplace.
Making the difference
Quality of service is invariably the difference between customers, in our case brokers, placing return business or not. Receiving bad service lives long in the memory and leads to people being particularly vocal in their displeasure.
The impact of word of mouth criticism should not be underestimated and can spread like wildfire. This is why it is important to treat every single case as comprehensively and professionally as the last.
Going that extra mile can conversely set tongues wagging about the quality of service received. Consistency in standards, whether the case in question is large or small, is vital to maintaining a good reputation.
Secured loan applications will go through quicker when the case is presented to the lender in the best possible and most consistent way.
By choosing a packager who believes in the benefits of consistently thorough packaging, common sense says that it will enable you to have a greater chance of completing the deal.
The speed of this service will also help in the completion of these deals as the faster the broker is able to return to the client with the full details then the more likely the deal is to go ahead.
So the question remains what particular service elements should brokers look for when placing a case with a master broker/packager?
Diversity
Diversity is the key to any secured loan packagers’ offering in the form of an array of products and services that they have built into their proposition.
With so few lenders remaining in the secured loan marketplace, it’s vital that your packager can offer as wide a range of products as possible.
This means it is increasingly important that brokers choose a packager of a decent size who has a good relationship with the lenders and therefore whose business matters to these lenders.
The strength of these relations are vital in the current climate and such strength and reliance on each other can lead to – for want of a better word – favours and compromises being made in order to see a deal through to completion.
Technology
The packager you deal with should have the very latest IT systems which ensure that deals are placed correctly first time.
The secured loan industry is still crying out for improved technology that will streamline the process, but there is no doubt that even though it is still evolving, it plays a major part in any service offering and this is certainly an area that we have to be on top of in order to give brokers the most efficient service possible.
Quality
Good quality and experienced staff are the bedrock of any good secured loan packagers proposition and generally they should be incentivised to get business completed.
By paying decent levels of bonus, good packagers have staff that care about their cases just as much as the broker themselves.
Communication
As I have touched on before, mortgage brokers like consistency when dealing with a packager. With this in mind a packager should have dedicated points of contact for a broker.
This ensures that the broker and packager can build a strong relationship over a period of time.
All in all, I cannot emphasise enough the importance of good relationships in all links in the chain and these relationships are generally built on the quality of service provided – if this link fails then inevitably everything else will start to crumble around it.
Quality is key and moving forward this will become increasingly evident across the whole of market so don’t let your standards slip.
