Hit the ground running to meet pent-up demand in 2023

There has been precious little time to take a step back and hit the reset button after what has proved to be a rollercoaster of a year for the lending and intermediary communities. However, many minds within the industry are already turning to 2023 and undoubtedly using this time to prime themselves to hit the ground running in order to meet pent-up purchase and remortgage demand from a host of landlords and residential borrowers.

Inevitably, the later part of 2022 has seen activity levels fall across the purchase arena and even in the remortgage sector due to heightened mortgage rates and wider economic uncertainty. During this period, many potential buyers, homeowners and landlords have adopted a ‘wait and see’ attitude but the tide is turning as mortgages rates continuing to trend, albeit slowly and steadily, in a downward direction. A trend which is widely expected to continue.

This indicates that we may be looking at a particularly busy Q1 to 2023 as that backlog of both purchase and remortgage borrowers return to the market, and it is critical that lenders have the infrastructure in place to maintain the highest of service standards even when volumes increase.

For an internal lending perspective, there’s always a huge amount of work going on behind the scenes. Here at Foundation Home Loans, we like to think of ourselves as an innovator. Not just from a product standpoint but also in terms of how we service the needs of our intermediary partners.

Like many lenders, we invest heavily in IT and in recent weeks have updated our AI and CRM capabilities to enable more data to be at our people’s fingertips. The aim being to strengthen output and offer better support to advisers and their clients. This includes offering better communication routes to whomever advisers need to speak to and personalising the communications they receive from us so they are truly relevant to the individual recipient.

Education remains a key component in a mortgage market which is becoming ever more complex. As such, we’ve improved our intermediary-facing website by making it easier to navigate and this now hosts over 100 pages, guides and FAQs in video and other formats. We’ve also migrated to a new server. This means that the countless systems behind the whole broker experience are now much more in tune with each other and able to offer greater operational scalability, security and capacity.

Products, criteria and policy all tend to be the focal point for advisers and their clients - and rightly so - but it’s vital for lenders to constantly evolve their offering to help futureproof their business and furthering relationships with their intermediary partners. This all feeds into a relentless pursuit to consistently improve the overall service proposition and this is an outlook which has generated plenty of plaudits for us as a business in 2022, especially over the past few months. This culminated in being named the top-rated lender in both the buy-to-let and specialist lender categories for broker satisfaction in Smart Money People’s Mortgage Lender Benchmark for H2 2022. Which represents a significant acknowledgement.

Looking forward, 2023 is set to be a year packed with challenges and opportunities which lenders and brokers need to meet together. We believe that the infrastructure we have put in place in recent times has put us ahead of the specialist lending curve but these enhancements across our IT and general service proposition are just the start.

Competition is likely to increase across the specialist lending markets over the next 12 months and this means that we, like all lenders, can’t afford to take our foot off the gas in our quest to make it even easier for the intermediaries to do business with us.