Why not become a ‘house move specialist’, wonders Phil Whitehouse, head of TMA
After speaking to a couple of people recently about the nightmare they were having moving house, either with solicitors or removals or whatever, it made me realise what an opportunity there is for advisers who are prepared to think differently about what they do and the services that they could offer in the housing chain.
Most mortgage brokers I speak to say they feel it is important to remove the stress of the mortgage side of buying a house for their client – your clients use you because you give them good advice and make their lives easier, you find a suitable mortgage, deal with the lender from start to finish and smooth the waters and you make it all happen.
Now imagine that you could do that for the whole house buying process. How much would your clients pay you for you to take all the hassle away from each part of the transaction and make it easy for them?
We must all know a number of people who hate haggling, and for whom the thought of the negotiation around a house sale and purchase is a complete nightmare. What if you could do that for them? What if you were their intermediary or representative between the estate agent and the seller, so they didn’t have to get involved in the ‘dirty’ side of haggling or negotiating rates or even speaking to the seller directly? Many people I’m sure would be pretty happy to pay a little bit extra to have this taken away from them by someone they could trust to do it on their behalf.
Once you embrace this idea, it could run and run: You could also represent the client with the solicitor, so that it’s you, the adviser, who phones the solicitor every day to give them a kick – or a bit of gentle persuasion – to keep them on track and on time. You would be in a much stronger position to do this than the one-off buyer because, if you dealt with it all the time, you would have a pretty good idea of what the solicitor should be asking for and when they should be doing it. Rather than a recent story I heard, of a solicitor taking almost two months to send off for land registry documents for the seller of a property, you would know this is something that should happen in the first week. This would help to keep the solicitors on their toes and speed the house buying process along.
Of course as a ‘house move specialist’ who is involved in every part of the process, rather than purely as a mortgage broker, you would add a level of value that is rarely, if ever, seen. The benefits are many fold:
* The faster the process moves the quicker you would receive your money in terms of proc fees
* You would gain additional income from clients, with a reasonable charge either for managing the whole process or for taking control of bits of it
* You could help the client choose who they dealt with in terms of solicitor, surveyors and removals, so they only deal with the people and companies that you know work effectively and minimise issues.
* You could establish reciprocal arrangements with companies you work with therefore establishing new or additional income streams.
This year the mortgage market is forecast to be £130 billion compared to £363.8 billion in 2007. Next year the forecast is for it to be even tighter. Therefore there will be an ever increasing need for mortgage brokers to find new sources of income, and new forms of income that take into account regional variations and the local market place.
Rather than leave the industry, or take part time work as many intermediaries have done in order to pay their own mortgages, this kind of diversification could have your business flourishing.
And, as you would have so little competition, you could add real value to the client and the house buying and selling process at the same time as building a very profitable business. It’s a different way of looking at your role, but maybe it’s worth thinking about.