Page 24 - Future Demands Jan 2021

250,000 found their new way so much quicker at getting to the office they stuck with it once normality resumed.
It’s this practical open mindedness that we should collectively be channelling, as our mortgage industry – in all its one hundred year glory – is creaking at the seams.
Over a century, our entire house buying and selling process has been built in ramshackle silos. Our component parts – from estate agents to conveyancers, lenders to brokers, and everything in between have focussed on our own challenges, with next to no consideration for the rest of the chain.
We can all cite personal examples of frustrating inefficiencies in our own businesses, but the real loser in all of this is the customer.
In 2019 the average time taken to sell a property from listing was 19 weeks, and government sources estimated up to 33% of all home buying transactions failed, costing buyers and sellers “more than £1,000 every time”, and amounting to “hundreds of millions of pounds annually”.
This trend continues across remortgaging, with research suggesting painful mortgage memories put off one million Brits from switching mortgage, even when it’s in their financial interest. This costs UK homeowners an estimated £9.8 billion annually, with around two million borrowers in the UK on a Standard Variable Rate mortgage when they don’t need to be.
But it’s not just financial. From a human perspective 23% of First Time Buyers had to take a day off work just to sort mortgage admin, and – perhaps most sadly of all – in 2017 we discovered one in ten First Time Buyers were reduced to tears, due to the exhausting process we were limping by with.
At a time when tech is re-imagining everything from how we take taxis, how we bank, and how we virtually meet our friends and family, we had to be aware that at some point it would be our turn. Well that turn is now.
The government is leading an industry working group to reimagine and redesign our entire buying and selling process – and it promises to finally give the customer the very best experience.
Unlike the last one hundred years, this time all parties will be involved in the creation of a new and better way for people to buy and sell their homes.
Gone will be the days where things were allowed to nearly get to the end, only to fall down because all the parties involved didn’t have access to the readily available data.
Farewell to those infuriating days of our lives working on a sale for a homeowner – only to discover that the prospect buyer was never able to complete from the very start.
And, for the most important people – the customers – so long and good riddance to those ponderous
months of waiting, the heartbreak of another fall-through, and the accompanying tears.
The facilitator for all of this will be data. From Land Registry, to customer finance, almost all of the info is already there to make the most incredible positive differences to our industry. And it is accumulating this data and moving it all to the front of the process – in a way that ensures our customers feel trust in us as an industry – that will help us all to go onto great things.
We have a responsibility and an opportunity to work collaboratively in 2021 and beyond to shape our industry, but it will take honest appraisals of our collective failings, and bold imagination to craft our new path.
Change is coming for us all, and now is our time to make this count. After all, as Benjamin Franklin once said, “When you are finished changing, you are finished”.
FUTURE DEMANDS
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