Speaking at the Green Mortgage Summit, Luke Loveridge (pictured, second from left), strategic adviser at Eco Approach, said a key way to get more retrofit conversations going was to increase the awareness from consumers earlier on in the nurture journey, so brokers are not having to advise on retrofit improvements.
“The retrofit information should be earlier in the nurture journey, so six months out from renewal, how do you get some of these digital retrofit tools to increase the awareness of consumers, landlords or homeowners? So actually, when they get to the broker, the customer should be the one to say that they want to improve their house. It’s then on the broker to look through finance options, rather than do the selling on the retrofit,” he added.
Matt Coulson (pictured, second from right), founder of Heron Financial, agreed, adding that the “signposting element is the most important part and from an adviser perspective”.
However, he said there was a “worry” among advisers, as during the advice process, they have “many things to consider already in terms of the compliance piece”, and this is expected to increase.
“It’s dangerous territory to start giving some of the advice [around retrofit], and a year later, they’re going to come back and ask you why their energy bill hasn’t gone down.
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“So, for us, it’s about building signposting into the process as early as possible and then, as that customer lands at the point where you can actually transact, the seed has been planted,” he said.
Coulson said that at Heron Financial, this was considered a “strategic essential”, and it was important now for advisers to have “more in-depth conversations” as the regulator removes the advice trigger for mortgages.
“We need to put that information out there, give the client something that they can look at and understand, and then take that further,” he noted.
Consumer Duty element to retrofit and green conversations
Karina Gerdes (pictured, far right), group head of sustainability at Mortgage Advice Bureau (MAB), said that at MAB, the firm had “baked it into our advice process” to check the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) ratings and to pick up those conversations.
She said that from MAB’s perspective, “what good looks like is tying energy efficiency directly to affordability as part of the back-plan conversation, but also then later on, when they’re going into remortgage and further follow-up conversations”.
“If you think about it from a Consumer Duty perspective, you’ve got this obligation to prevent foreseeable harm to the customer. We’re in a period where we’ve recently seen massive energy price fluctuations, political uncertainty, and that’s not even thinking about climate change.
“But just looking at what’s happening on the customer’s doorstep, what happens to their mortgage affordability and their ability to meet monthly bills in two years’ time? What if there’s another shock to the pricing system? It is something that will impact consumer finances, and therefore, it absolutely falls within the remit of an adviser to talk about it,” Gerdes noted.
