Selling the non-bank proposition to customers has been the biggest hurdle, says lender
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A group of specialist lenders will be hosting another ‘speed dating’ event for mortgage advisers, which will take place on Wednesday 14th November in Wellington.
The event will feature a total of nine specialist lenders: Avanti, Bluestone, First Mortgage Trust, Heartland, Liberty, NZCU, RESIMAC, Southern Cross Partners, and Spotcap, who will be talking about their respective offerings in the mortgage space and working to lift education and awareness within the industry.
Each lender will have a 10 minute elevated pitch on their key niches and policy, and will present to a group of 8-10 mortgage advisers. The groups then keep circulating until all advisers have heard the pitches of all nine lenders.
“This event is an opportunity for advisers to have access to 9 specialist lenders to learn about their key niches and policy criteria,” a group representative told NZ Adviser.
“It is all about education, and helping them identify areas where they could have potentially assisted clients who have been declined by mainstream lenders due to the recent credit tightening in that lending arena. Specialist lending is a very small portion of the home loan market in New Zealand and growing, and brokers are regularly getting loans rejected by banks. We want to show how specialist lenders can help these customers.”
The representative says educating advisers on how to identify a good specialist lender deal has been one of the biggest challenges for the sector, and the event aims to create more awareness so that these opportunities aren’t missed.
“The biggest hurdle in selling the specialist proposition to customers is that they usually expect low interest rates and fees similar to those of the banks, and they don't understand that the bank has declined their business,” she stated. “Advisers need to learn to position customers on repayments, and not rates.
“The specialist lending market in New Zealand before the GFC hit was around 5% of the housing market. Today, specialist lenders are sitting at around 1% of the market, so the opportunity to grow in New Zealand for all specialist lenders is significant.”
