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Know your BDM: Chris Flowers, Pure Retirement

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  • 15/06/2016
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Know your BDM: Chris Flowers, Pure Retirement
This week Mortgage Solutions quizzes Pure Retirement's business development manager Chris Flowers on working with brokers and the biggest challenges he faces.

How many brokers and broker firms do you cover in your role?

My role means I look after the south of England and Wales, with approximately 1,000 brokers, but this number is increasing daily as we get new registrations – it’s always great to meet with new brokers.

How do you successfully organise and deal with business on a daily basis?

I think that the key to being organised is being able to delegate and have a great team around you. That is easy in my job as I honestly believe we have the best broker support and underwriters in the industry. They are the people who do all the hard work and get cases completed for all our brokers.

What issues come up time and time again?

Some mortgage brokers don’t always realise that underwriting criteria on a lifetime mortgage are different to a standard mortgage, in that we are not too concerned about a client’s credit history. We put more emphasis on the property and future ability to sell as this will be used to repay the loan in the majority of cases.

What do you wish brokers understood about your job?

We have no control over what valuation a surveyor puts on a property, and we get as frustrated as brokers do when it gets down-valued.

What do you think is the most important attribute in a good BDM?

Managing relationships and helping brokers understand where our products fit and, just as importantly, where they don’t fit.

When you’re unavailable to contact via telephone, what’s the second-best way for brokers to get in touch?

Either email me, or contact the team at head office. As previously mentioned they are all brilliant and will gladly help you. We even have a live chat function on our website so during office hours you can speak with someone without having to pick up the phone if you don’t want to.

If you were head of the FCA for the day, what would you change about regulation in the mortgage industry?

I would like the FCA to help the Equity Release Council in promoting and educating clients about equity release as there are still some misconceptions among the general public and IFAs. This is getting a lot better, but for later life lending to really reach its full potential there is still a lot of hard work to be done.

What was your motivation for choosing business development as a career?

I chose this career path to help grow the advisers’ knowledge in the equity release industry.

How do you establish and maintain a good relationship with brokers?

I think the key to having a good relationship with brokers is to add value to their business; this can be helping them with their knowledge, giving insight into how the competition work or sharing good working practice from other brokers.

And how do you establish and maintain good relationships internally?

I find that working in the field, you always have to stay in contact with your head office team otherwise being a BDM can be a lonely job. Therefore I will always try and speak with the office and update them on what I am doing and check up on cases. In conjunction with the other BDM, we run a monthly update which allows us to tell the rest of the company what we have been up to and give them a market update. This seems to go down really well.

What’s the strangest question you’ve ever been asked?

I have been asked a lot of questions that sadly aren’t repeatable. The best one I can think of was when I was advising and a gentleman asked if he could take out a lifetime mortgage on local authority property that he rented, and couldn’t understand when I said no, you have to actually own the property.

And finally, what did you want to be growing up?

I’m no Andy Murray but I always wanted to be a professional tennis player.

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