More than ninety lenders, and one of them is your bank
The UK has over ninety mortgage lenders: the high-street names, plus building societies, specialist lenders and lenders who deal only through intermediaries. Your own bank is one of them. When you walk into a branch or open its app, the products you are shown are that lender’s own. That is not a criticism of banks — it is simply the edge of what any one of them can sell you.
Not every broker sees the whole market
“Broker” is not one thing. Some work from a panel: a fixed list of twenty or thirty lenders they hold arrangements with. That is a far wider view than a single bank, but it is still a slice of the circle. Whole-of-market means the adviser can consider the full range available through intermediaries, including products sold only through a broker that never appear on a comparison site.
The gap has a price
The distance between the best product your own lender can offer you and the best product available anywhere shows up in one place: your monthly payment. Over a mortgage running for decades, a modest difference in rate compounds into a large difference in what you hand over. That gap is what Amit draws in the film, and it is why the question “who are you comparing?” matters at least as much as “what is your rate?”
Three questions worth asking any adviser
- How many lenders do you work with, and is that a panel or the whole market?
- Can you reach products I could not find myself online?
- How are you paid, and will I be charged a fee?
Anyone worth using will answer all three without hesitating.
