"Skyrocketing to the top of my list right now are free legals. Just because they're free doesn't mean they need to be an absolute shambles."
Responses ranged from free legals, service levels, and lenders pulling deals at short notice. Here are our top responses:
Paul Neal, mortgage and equity release specialist at Missing Element Mortgage Services: "Skyrocketing to the top of my list right now are free legals. Just because they're free doesn't mean they need to be an absolute shambles. These conveyancers take an horrendously long time to do pretty much anything. They're a confederacy of dunces. It takes hours to speak to someone, they don't return calls or emails, and then they wonder why they get a bad name. Second on my list is conditional selling, where estate agents force buyers to use their in-house broker and legal services or don't put an offer forward. Recently, I have had an estate agent refusing to give a client a memorandum of sale as they didn't use their in-house broker. It's beyond petty."
Imran Hussain, director at Harmony Financial Services: "The biggest pain in the proverbial right now has to be lenders pulling deals with short notice. This applies nothing but stress and puts huge pressure on advisers and clients who have to hurry and get applications through in quick time. Another big bugbear is the lack of supply resulting in clients having to offer over the odds to secure a property only for the valuation to then return less than what was offered and no one able to actually proceed."
Ian Hewett, founder at The Bearded Mortgage Broker: "Service levels, sorry, I mean the total lack of service levels. From lenders leaving you on hold daily for an hour at a time. Being number 4000 in a queue of 4001 on a live chat that you know probably won't answer your question. Conveyancing taking forever - I had two conveyancers four doors apart from each other but they posted their enquiries via 2nd class post, you cannot make it up! Still blaming Covid, it has been two years, improve your processes you morons. Being sent a nonsensical email from an underwriter when a phone call would have clarified it far quicker. Secure email passwords, lenders changing rates and criteria at the drop of a hat, computer says no mentality, BDMs asking for votes for their service when they never return calls or have even said hello to you four years into the job. Anyway, I am going back to my padded cell now."
Rob Gill, managing director at Altura Mortgage Finance: "With criteria becoming stricter for self-employed borrowers, there's an increasing trend for borrowers to try and underwrite their own mortgage, so to speak. Providing spreadsheets and lengthy explanations as to how and why they can afford the mortgage. Sending through large files of documents, including everything but the document the actual underwriter is asking for, along with the standard lengthy explanation as to why they should be good enough. These are often business owners, used to assessing risk and making deals, and their frustration is understandable. However, this doesn't mean that they can apply their own criteria to underwrite their own mortgage."
Graham Cox, founder and director at Self Employed Mortgage Hub: "My biggest bugbear is the difficulty getting mortgage deals over the line. People either can't borrow enough, or are overstretching themselves financially to get a mortgage because prices are so crazily high. This madness has to stop. The housing market is in an unsustainable bubble that will soon burst. That may be the only crumb of comfort for young people trying to get on the ladder."
Rob Peters, principal at Simple Fast Mortgage: "Nothing annoys me more than stack them high and sell them cheap legal services, with inadequately trained, over-worked and under-paid legal assistants juggling skyscraper high caseloads. The clients are suffering poor service, the caseworkers are suffering mental breakdowns, and advisers are having to go way beyond their natural remit to get deals through. Yet fat cat law firms continue to line their pockets while damaging the reputation of the whole legal community."
Scott Taylor-Barr, financial adviser at Carl Summers Financial Services: "For me the biggest frustration right now is the constant withdrawal of rates at short notice. While I know the reasons lenders do it, I feel that the real world consequence of it gets forgotten. If a lender announces they will withdraw rates at 3pm, with all applications to be with them by 10pm that evening (and that's quite a generous timescale in all honesty at the moment), the result is brokers up and down the land cancelling their evenings to chase up and submit any cases they have for that lender. That means cancelling time with their family, missing their children's parents evening, or not going to that theatre show they had tickets for. The alternative is spending the next few days re-sourcing all of those deals and having to approach new lenders, as well as having to tell clients that the rate and mortgage payment we've all been discussing has now changed, and not for the better."
Mark Dyason, owner at Edinburgh Mortgage Advice: "The pandemic and its aftermath have shone a light onto the creaky parts of the mortgage process. Currently, we have a top five lender unable to respond to a new application in the first 12 working days, another lender whose SLA for sending an email is 5 days and a third whose SLA for loading the offer to the legal system is 8 working days. In an active market, these all cause clients significant stress. We need the industry as a whole to invest in the technology that makes any manual turnarounds a thing of the past. The legacy systems need replacing and a new wave of inovation brought in. We are a multi-billion industry with a fabulous product used by nearly all homeowners at some point, but we need to up our game before someone new comes in and eats our lunch."
Lewis Shaw, founder of Shaw Financial Services: “The inability of some lenders to answer a phone and sort out situations that would take 5 minutes on the blower but extends to weeks playing email tennis is the first. The second has to be conveyancing; what takes so long? I've got cases that should be open and shut, yet it always feels like a solicitor would rather pick up a snake than the phone. Thirdly, can lenders please stop removing products with a few seconds' notice; we know it's a tricky time with money markets bouncing around faster than Boris can get to his parties; however, the stress level it creates is unbearable. Finally, and perhaps the biggest frustration of the job is (and I suspect you could do a poll on this, and it would win) getting documents in the right format from customers, particularly bank statements. Again, it's not the customers' fault, I hasten to add; banking apps have become the mainstay, and so many banks apps don't have the ability to download and send statements from them, which causes all sorts of issues that could be avoided.”
