Given that we are on the verge of launching a new lender, one that we have significant ambitions for, and we will be lending real money again from next month, you might forgive me for being a) rather excited at the prospect, and b) somewhat stressed about ensuring everything is done on time. Well, you’d be perfectly right to assume a) but as for b) I’m afraid you’d be quite wrong.
There is obviously much to do when launching any new business, and joining up all the dots when it comes to launching a lender is a lot of work, especially given the short timescale we set ourselves. However given the team we have put together – and the vast amount of experience they come with – I am pretty relaxed about the whole process and the quality of the proposition we will be bringing to market. Certainly, if we were running on industry goodwill alone then we would have no problems whatsoever because pretty much everyone we’ve spoken to has been completely enthused by what we are doing and buys into what Fleet will bring to the market.
That said, I am not so naïve as to think this means we will be an immediate (and ongoing) success and that brokers and their clients are going to drop everything and rush headlong into our arms. One very good friend of mine, who also happens to run a competitor lender, firmly pointed this out to me just last week and I’m also clear that just because we’re new, and perhaps flavour of the month, this doesn’t mean applications will be flooding in from day one.
Therefore, the priority for us at the moment has to be on the product range we will launch to market next month and, from there, it will also be about the quality of the service we offer brokers and their clients. We fully recognise that no-one has a God-given right to secure business in this marketplace and we will be measured by the quality of our offering and whether we deliver what we say we will. Again, while the stress levels might rise very slightly at the thought of this, I’m 100% confident in what we can bring to the buy-to-let space now, and perhaps other product sectors in the future.
At present however buy-to-let is our ‘breakfast, lunch and dinner’ – it’s what we’ve eaten everyday for most of our careers, it’s where our experience lies and it’s where we feel we can make the most impact. You’ll hopefully have read that we see our proposition as one that will be completely compatible with that of the ‘experienced’ landlord, and we certainly feel that some areas of the buy-to-let sector – namely lending to limited companies, finance for small to medium HMOs, etc – are underserved by buy-to-let lenders at the moment. You will not need to be Mystic Meg to anticipate a product range from Fleet which looks to cater for these types of clients.
Neither will you need to be in possession of a crystal ball to anticipate us trying to replicate what we achieved at our former lender. We created a quality, profitable mortgage book there by being a responsible lender that did not chase market share but looked at the quality of the property and the borrower. Again, we’ll be looking to do that all over again with perhaps a little bit of added panache – whatever that might mean.
So we are incredibly enthused by the proposition we are putting together and the impact we can have, and yes while there may be a very small degree of trepidation, there is also the sense that we are grasping a real opportunity in this marketplace and we will be able to offer (and deliver) a great number of benefits to the intermediary marketplace and its client base. In a very true sense, we can’t wait to get going.
Bob Young is chief executive officer of Fleet Mortgages