About mortgage brokers

What do mortgage brokers do?

Mortgage brokers are financial advisers with specialist knowledge of the UK mortgage industry.  Mortgage brokers can not only help you choose a suitable mortgage from the thousands of deals available on the market, they negotiate on your behalf with mortgage lenders and should be able to help you obtain a better deal than you would have done without their help.  Due to their industry position and bargaining power, mortgage brokers can normally offer you exclusive mortgage deals unavailable elsewhere.

Mortgage brokers should not only take away the worry of choosing the best mortgage deal for you, but also shelter you from some of the perceived stress involved in either remortgaging (at L&C we make this as hassle-free paperwork-less a process as is possible – see our real life diary of a remortgager) or the very real stress associated with house moving.  Mortgage brokers can troubleshoot on your behalf and using their expertise to hurry things along. 

How do you know which mortgage broker to consult?

It is a myth that the personalised financial advice offered by mortgage brokers comes at a cost – a myth which we at L&C try hard to dispel.  There is no need to pay an advice fee to mortgage brokers.  Another myth is that you have to choose between paying mortgage brokers a fee for advice or save work by doing the work yourself.  Again, we try to dispel this myth.  At L&C we do all the work for you and we charge no fee for advice (see our no broker fee policy).

The FSA (Financial Services Authority) took over regulating the UK mortgage industry in 2004 in order to ensure that customers received clear and simple advice and knew exactly what they were getting upfront when approaching mortgage brokers.  One of the most important criteria when looking for mortgage advice is whether the broker is ‘whole of the market’.  When mortgage brokers are whole of the market it means that they can select from every available mortgage deal in the UK, not just from a panel of mortgage lenders.  For more on whole of the market mortgage brokers, see our article: independent or whole of the market mortgage brokers?

So to narrow the field when looking at suitable mortgage brokers, we recommend that you look for:

whole of the market
no broker fee
good reputation: do your research. 

If you do, you could save yourself thousands of pounds over the lifetime of your mortgage, not to mention a lot of headaches.

At L&C, we are confident that we can offer you everything you could need from a mortgage broker.  Check out our customer testimonials and case studies – plus our awards!

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