Fee free brokers?!? Any good ones?

lonestarfan

nubbins wrote: »

Unless I am missing something why do you need to meet the broker and why do they have to be near? I have had a 5 mortgages sorted out by 2 brokers (fee free) who i've never met in person and aboth live mileas away. All have been trouble free in terms of information flowing to and fro.

Perhaps you don't need to meet the Broker.
You have to meet your solicitor in Person to do the passport check as they have to check its you.
The Brokers will be on here early morning and tell us I'm sure.

Senior_Paper_Monitor

No need to meet - plenty of compliant options including forwarding documents by registered post or courier, having local certification (Post Office is easy - if jokably incompetent) etc

Applies to both broker (we only meet c 20% of our clients) and solicitor (our recommended solicitor has only ever met one of our clients to the best of my knowledge - and it is impossible to get past reception let alone meet a real solicitor at most 'conveyancing factory' operations).

kingstreet

Can I just say we choose to operate a model which means we meet each of our clients face to face.

I'm not suggesting anyone "needs" to meet a broker face to face, but how we choose to operate suits us and our approach.

amnblog

lonestarfan wrote: »

You have to meet your solicitor in Person to do the passport check as they have to check its you.

This is not the case as you will know if you have ever had a lender allocate their panel solicitor to you on a 'fees paid' remortgage deal.

OneEngland

I'm a few free broker and meet 99% of my clients. Due to location, charging a fee is completely unnecessary, I rely on repeat business and recommendation. Do a good job and clients come back!
I do turn business away that is outside of a reasonable distance unless it's a recommended client.

Dave_Ham

This is a topical debate, personally I cannot see unless you are the scale of L&C how this is workable business model in the current climate.


Potentially an argument if you are a one man band or inexperienced and looking to grow your client bank, but carrying a pipeline of cases and with case drop offs cannot see the fee free model being commercially viable or provide the client with suitable levels of communication/service.


This is heightened if operating on a face to face basis, in my opinion.

kingstreet

As I've mentioned previously, if we didn't charge a fee, a lot of the stuff we do around Staffordshire and West Midlands we would have to stop doing; or at least turn away the current Shared Ownership business we do and introduce a minimum mortgage requirement to ensure we earned a minimum commission per case.

On our general newbuild stuff, we're lucky as the broker fee is normally paid by the builder.

ACG

If commission alone is enough then fine. But being up north proc fees alone are generally around the £300-400 mark - which in my eyes just isnt enough.

I was fee free for the first year of being a broker and was literally skint living payment to payment. The day I started charging fees was the day I could limit the amount of business I took on meaning I can spend more time per client and not fighting fires or running round like a blue assed fly.

If I had to go back to fee free I would quit. For the amount of stress involved I would rather go and stack shelves as it was not far of minimum wage anyway.

nubbins

I presume the fee is based on size of mortgage then? My last Halifax mortgage stated £970 to go to my broker against 325k.

kingstreet

High street lender commission is typically 0.32% to 0.35%, so £320 to £350 for every £100k borrowed.

Our last shared ownership case was a £40,000 mortgage, which earned us £148 gross, before network payaway and compliance costs. We couldn't accept such cases without charging the £250 fee.