Little hope on turnaround times

Mortgage advisers predict there will be little progress made on turnaround times this year, as processing times continue to deteriorate across the industry.

Wednesday, January 13th 2021, 9:29AM 2 Comments

Turnaround times are frequently cited by advisers as the biggest concern for the sector, and slowed further last year as banks dealt with a backlog of mortgage deferral requests and additional scrutiny on new mortgage deals.

Gopal Sreenivasan, head of strategic partnerships at Newpark, predicts that turnaround times will stay at current levels, or even deteriorate, into the new year.

"Turnaround times will stay around three to four weeks, and I predict it will get worse around March and April due to the traditional influx of applications happening around this time of the year," he told TMM Online.

Mortgage Suite's Krish Krishna is not holding out hope for an improvement in the problem that has plagued the industry for years.

"There are no signs of improvements anytime soon unless they streamline the processes and get more experienced assessors onboard," he said.

Kris Pedersen of Kris Pedersen Mortgages said turnaround times were "the largest problem most advisers have faced this year", and added the issue was causing "a large amount of channel conflict" between advisers and product providers.

Tags: Lending

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Comments from our readers

On 13 January 2021 at 11:34 am valkyrie6 said:

Yes, and I have heard that branch staff have taken to telling customers to deal directly with the branch as the broker channel turn around times are shockingly bad, and they can do things faster.
I guess all we advisers can hope for is an even playing field, no more no less.

On 13 January 2021 at 12:59 pm Amused said:

The future when it comes to mortgage advisers sending loan applications to lenders is clearly for the banks to build their own online portals which will see an adviser logging in and sending an application directly to a bank without any involvement of a group owned CRM. One only has to look at the Partners Life online application system i.e. MUM which is completely independent of any group owned CRM and has massive benefits to both the adviser and client in terms of improved underwriting times.

Given it's now 2021 the banks need to start doing something similar for mortgage advisers and our customers. Long overdue!

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