The intermediary arm of Yorkshire Building Society has big ambitions to grow its market share in buy-to-let by entering new sub-sectors.
Chris Maggs, Accord’s buy to let commercial manager, said the lender also has plans to lend in Scotland.
“The main reason we haven’t launched into these markets yet is because we needed to take some time to digest all the regulatory and tax changes before looking at our proposition,” he explained.
“Although the size of the first-time landlord market is now debatable following on from the changes to Stamp Duty, it will still be a sizeable share of the market that we want to look at.”
Maggs explained that Accord still intended to continue with its ‘cautious’ approach to buy-to-let lending. He added that as a top-heavy remortgage lender in the buy-to-let sector, Accord hadn’t witnessed the rush for purchases as profoundly as other firms in the lead up to the Stamp Duty hike on 1 April.
Earlier this year, Accord retrained case managers as underwriters in a bid to improve broker’s experience of dealing with residential cases at the lender. Maggs said there are plans to also roll this out across the buy-to-let business.
“The focus at Yorkshire Building Society Group has always been on best buy, but we want to improve the service delivery behind that as we don’t always want to be be known as a price-led lender. We have already reduced our processing time significantly from an average of 25 days to 15 days, and I think we could go lower still.”
