It’s fair to say that lessons had been learnt and all lenders operated from a far more educated and robust lending platform second time round.
And with fewer restrictions in place, the mortgage market remained open for new lending and demand remained strong, spurred on by the stamp duty holiday.
Here, at Foundation Home Loans, we have benefitted from a successful Q3 and equally busy Q4, which has resulted in a significant new business pipeline.
But it’s not quite ‘business as usual’.
Rightmove, now estimates 650,000 sales are currently going through the buying and selling process – that’s 67 per cent more than at the same time in 2019. It illustrates the scale of the challenges faced by mortgage lenders and the legal profession to get these deals to completion before the stamp duty holiday ends.
We’ve already heard from a number of major players in the market talking about ‘deadline dates’ for advisers and their clients when it comes to starting and progressing cases in order to give them the best chance of completing before 31 March.
With this in mind, alongside our continued appetite and commitment to accepting new business, we have taken steps to ensure we are closely managing and expediting pipeline cases where possible.
We are in the fortunate position that our in-house servicing offers total control when it comes to the allocation, or reallocation, of resources, and the flexibility of our highly experienced team allows us to focus more of our attention on servicing areas of high demand.
As such, in addition to their ‘normal’ broker support role, our internal and regional BDMs are currently working closely with brokers to gain the final requirements on all applications.
This extra support will allow our underwriters to concentrate on reviewing the case with all requirements met, to bring it to offer.
BDMs have obviously had to adapt in recent times, but a key component within their role has always been to support intermediaries when and where they needed it most.
While obstacles remain post-offer, it falls on the lending community to focus a proportional allocation of resources on moving applications forward in a timely manner, so that as many borrowers as possible can benefit from these valuable tax savings.
And this is certainly an issue which we will continue to focus on in the coming weeks.
