Why us
Most people meet their mortgage as a rate and a monthly figure. The parts that decide what it really costs — the product term, the arrangement fee, what happens when the fixed period ends — arrive later, in paperwork, when the offer is already moving.
This page sets out what we do differently, and is deliberately specific about where an adviser adds nothing so you can judge the rest.
The idea
Go direct to a bank and you get a competent answer to a narrow question: what will this lender lend you, on the products it currently sells to the public. It is not a bad answer. It is simply the only one available from that source, and it comes with no way of knowing how it compares.
A whole-of-market search asks a different question — what will any residential lender lend, on any product, including the ones sold only through intermediaries. Those intermediary-only products are a real part of the market rather than a technicality, and they are invisible from a bank's website.
The value of that breadth is not evenly distributed. For a salaried applicant with a large deposit and a clean file, the market converges and the difference between the best direct offer and the best available offer is often small. For anyone whose income has a shape to it — self-employed, bonused, contracted, recently changed — the spread between lenders is wide, and knowing where to place the case is most of the outcome.
Whole-of-market search across residential lenders, including products not sold direct.
One adviser named on your file from first call to completion.
In practice
Four things, all of which are about avoiding a worse outcome rather than conjuring a better rate out of nowhere.
Being straight about it
If you are staying with your existing lender, your circumstances have not changed, and you are taking the product transfer it has offered you, that is a short conversation you can have yourself in an app. It is often the right thing to do. We would rather tell you that than take you through a full remortgage to arrive at the same place more slowly.
Equally, if your case is simple — employed, well within affordability, comfortably inside a good loan-to-value band — the market converges and several lenders will offer you something close to the same thing. Advice still has value in choosing the term and reading the fees, but the value is smaller and we will say so.
What we will not do is present a product transfer as though it were a whole-of-market recommendation, or a fee-paying route as though it were the only one. The comparison should be visible to you either way.
How we are paid
The FCA requires disclosure of the basis on which an adviser is paid before you are committed to anything. Here is what that means in practice.
Lenders pay a procuration fee to the intermediary who introduces a case. It is paid by the lender, not added to your loan, and the amount will be confirmed to you in writing.
Where a fee applies it is disclosed before you are committed to paying it, along with when it falls due and what happens if the application does not proceed. It is never taken as a surprise at the end.
Ask any adviser for the commission and the fee together, as one number. That is the cost of the advice, and it is the only figure that lets you compare one adviser with another.
Questions
Not automatically, and often the reverse. Lenders do not price intermediary products worse than direct ones — many of their sharpest products are intermediary-only. Where a broker fee applies it is a real cost and should be weighed, which is why it has to be disclosed to you in writing before you are committed. The comparison worth making is total cost through each route, fees included.
That the search covers lenders across the residential market rather than a restricted panel or a single lender. It is a defined term rather than a marketing one — a firm describing itself that way is making a statement about the scope of its search, and you are entitled to ask which lenders it can and cannot access.
Yes. A product transfer from your current lender is sometimes the best available outcome, particularly where circumstances have changed in a way that would make a new application difficult. It is a legitimate answer and we will give it.
No, and nobody can. A lender makes its own decision on its own criteria, after its own credit search and its own valuation of the property. What advice does is put the case in front of a lender whose criteria it actually fits, which is why a well-placed application is far less likely to be declined — not immune to it.
A first conversation of about fifteen minutes gives you a realistic borrowing range. A full recommendation, with products ranked on total cost, follows once we have your documents and have confirmed the figures — it is a matter of days rather than weeks, and how quickly depends mostly on how quickly the paperwork arrives.
Keep reading
Your home may be repossessed if you do not keep up repayments on your mortgage. Figures shown on this site are illustrative estimates and do not constitute advice or an offer of credit.
Next step
Fifteen minutes, no credit check, no cost. If the answer is that you should stay where you are, that is what you will be told.
