60 Seconds With.....Mark Harris
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Last week Savills said there were some signs of improvement in the mortgage market. Have we reached a turning point?
Yes, things have stopped getting worse, although that doesn’t mean they are getting any better. Anyone cracking open the champagne to celebrate a strong recovery at the moment is hopelessly naive. The market appears to have bottomed out and entered a period of consolidation but it will be at least 12 months before we see any significant pick-up.
The remortgage market is still closed, divided into those who want to remortgage and can’t and those who can remortgage but won’t because they are sitting on low SVRs. For that market to come back we’ll need interest rate movement but the consensus seems to be they’re not going anywhere for at least 12 months.
It’s been a wretched two years. How have you weathered the storm?
We have focussed on efficiency and cut costs. You cut back, you look at your systems and procedures, sales techniques and how you look after your clients and introducers. Doing this gives you the opportunity to analyse where you have gone wrong in the past and how you can maximise opportunities in better times.
Is the recent upturn in buy-to-let sustainable or is it a blip?
There are effectively only two lenders in this space - The Mortgage Works and BM Solutions. What we need is more lenders to support buy-to-let and until then any perceived recovery will be more in the nature of a blip. Too many lenders have had their fingers burnt in this sector and those memories are still fresh, but it’s a good market. And regulation shouldn’t make much difference either - we’ve always treated it as a regulated transaction and I think most brokers do too.
How do you think the market will adapt to the proposed ban on self-cert?
The pendulum swung too far one way and now it seems to be swinging too far the other. We need to find a middle ground on this subject, although I can understand why things have gone the way they have.
It’s particularly difficult for the self-employed - if their accounts don’t support an income they can’t have a mortgage. So they employ accountants to minimise their tax liability but the downside is that this creates a challenge in getting the mortgage they require.
