Chairing a panel on guiding first-time buyers, chair Clare Beardmore, director, mortgage at L&G, asked how the sector could improve financial literacy across a customer base that turned to places like TikTok and artificial intelligence (AI) for information.
Sam Fox, founder of UK Mortgage Centre, said firms should look into what was trending, the emotions of clients, and how digitally savvy they were and use this to produce educational, informative content authentically.
Industry coach and consultant Paul Flavin said that “education is the new marketing tool”, and brokers should become authorities in their specialism.
“You’ve got to be somewhere that the public can find you,” he added.
Flavin said Google was already losing market share to platforms like ChatGPT, which pulled information from social media rankings and posts to users.
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He added: “You need to be on there. If people are using ChatGPT instead of Google, you need to be found.”
Gurpreet Chahal, regional sales manager at Accord Mortgages, said that in expanding the market, “education is going to be key” as many people believed they could not get onto the housing ladder and were unaware of the solutions available.
He added: “We’ve probably been here before in terms of reality versus perception. Back in the day, someone down the pub might say ‘you can get XYZ’, but that might not be true. That’s why people need to speak to an adviser and say ‘this is your reality, this is what is feasible’.”
Danny Belton, head of TMG Club and partner strategy at TMG Mortgage Network, said firms needed to gain a sense of how people were feeling about mortgages and become experts on their concerns.
Belton said advisers also needed to be interested in what they did, as some attended webinars with the cameras off while working in the background and were not learning.
“We do need to focus on what’s in front of us. Ultimately, you’re an expert and you want to be a better expert, so to every customer that appears at your door, you appear knowledgeable.”
He said brokers should demonstrate that they were the person a customer should be speaking to, and staying on top of their own education was important.
“I had a period of time out, approximately eight months, and this is my first industry event back. It’s very quick to lose knowledge,” Belton added.
He said it was easy to “bury your heads” when it was busy, but said brokers must continue to follow developments in the market.
Jon Kempson, business development manager at Market Financial Solutions, said the lender was CPD-accredited and put a lot of educational resources on its website to provide information to advisers.
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