Mortgage brokers should embrace the revenue-generating opportunities created by having retrofitting conversations with clients when it is time to remortgage to a new deal, says Matt Coulson, director and principle of Heron Financial.
Coulson (pictured), who has put in place a strategy to contact clients ahead of their remortgage to raise awareness of the possibilities of green home improvements, said his interest in the green agenda was twofold: ethical and commercial.
“I don’t think we should shy away from [the commercial aspect],” said Coulson, speaking at the inaugural Green Mortgage Summit in London, which was hosted by Mortgage Solutions.
“There are going to be firms who lead the way in this and they are going to become known as guiding lights, people who can give advice in an area clients weren’t aware you could talk to a mortgage adviser about.
“Even if it’s just steering somebody towards a resource, it’s more than we were doing before and therefore there’s an opportunity to generate revenue. I don’t think we should necessarily hide from that fact. We’re businesses,” he added.
The event, held at 15 Hatfields, London, was a collaboration between AE3 Media – the parent company of Mortgage Solutions – the Association of Mortgage Intermediaries (AMI), the Green Finance Institute and the Green Mortgage Advice Initiative.
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Attendees listened to presentations from companies throughout the retrofit supply chain, such as lenders, energy assessors, compliance experts, heat pump specialists and representatives from the intermediary market.
Preventing ‘foreseeable harm’
Beyond the commercial benefits of building green conversations into the mortgage fact-find stage of the advice process, Coulson said brokers had a duty to help borrowers improve the energy efficiency of their homes.
He said: “We all talk about protection to our clients now; thank goodness, because there’s foreseeable harm there. Why are we not then talking about the property in the same way? As advisers, if we’re not flagging these things to our customers, then we could argue that there is foreseeable harm there that we’re not bringing to their attention.”
Coulson said education on having conversation needs to be pushed through at a firm level.
He continued: “We can’t be relying on an individual adviser who may or may not have a passing interest in this. It needs to be a consistent message.”
Standing apart
Raising the possibility of carrying out green home improvements was an opportunity for brokers to differentiate themselves from lenders, Coulson said.
“Lenders have kind of stepped away from the retention space because brokers have become very good at it, or better at it, at least. As an intermediary, we have the capacity to spend time discussing energy-efficiency needs, whereas the lender does not.
“It comes back to that commercial aspect. If we can spend the time with the client to help them with something they weren’t aware we could help with, they are not going to go direct [to the lender], they’ll come back to [their broker] again and again,” he said.
