The Buy to Let Market Forum 2016: An insider’s perspective

by: Liz Syms, owner of Connect for Intermediaries
  • 04/05/2016
  • 0
The Buy to Let Market Forum 2016: An insider’s perspective
It was good to be a sponsor at the popular Mortgage Solutions Buy to Let Market Forum event which saw hundreds of brokers flocking to the events, hunger for additional knowledge to help them grow their business.

As one of the sponsors, my company Connect for Intermediaries had a stand in the main room hoping to be able to promote our services to the attending brokers.

Fortunately, at the first coffee break the brokers were feeling confident and our stands were swamped with advisers. I am hoping it wasn’t just the chocolates and key rings that were attracting them.

What was surprising though is how many of these brokers had specialist cases that they were looking for assistance to place there and then. These included holiday lets being purchased in the name of a limited company, a broker’s client looking to buy 25 properties with an average purchase price of £50-£75000, an expat who had returned to the UK less than 12 months ago, a professional sports person with less than five years’ work left within his industry and the purchase of a bungalow to rent out with land ideal for development into six properties.

It was hard to talk for more than a few minutes with each broker as we had just the break times. At one point I was pitching to three brokers at once. We were able to confirm at the event we could assist the brokers from our specialist knowledge and lender panel and some of the enquiries from the events are already progressing.

One interesting case which we provided the broker a quotation for, was an expat living in Singapore looking to refinance a buy-to-let property valued at £1.3m. There was an existing loan of £960,000 but a rental income of just £3900 pcm. The client did have some funds to be able to pay down some of the loan, but we were still able to secure £835,000 borrowing on a five-year fixed rate of 4.49% with a low flat fee of just £999 including the survey fee.

The experience at each event was similar with a wide range of complex cases discussed with brokers. My only complaint is how much lovely food there was at each event and how badly I failed to resist it… That aside, these types of events are an absolute win-win for everyone.

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