With all due respect Sarah, people need to shop around in this market as from my experience not all brokers are the same.
1. Not all brokers deal with all lenders.
Agreed.
2. Some brokers have more of an interest in sending you to a particular lender over another due to commission etc paid to the broker.
Agreed
3. If you can get the same rate from the bank directly and get your valuation fee etc waived by the bank, i dont see the need for using a broker at all.
Don't agree. Margins on mortgages are now so tight that there is a huge amount of pressure on bank staff to cross sell additional, and possibly unneccesary additional/add on insurances. There is a hard sell to take the lenders household insurance and not always good advice on personal insurance. I always recommend taking the cheapest and most basic mortgage protection (as required in 95% of cases by the mortgage conditions). Insurance = commission and lenders push more expensive cover and mortgage payment protection policies as a matter of course.
I am aware of REAs legal deal and it does sound good so that would be one argument for using REA as a broker but again not all brokers support such a deal.
I can't speak for other brokers but I find it interesting that in 10 years no other broker has followed own business plan of offering a completely independent, transparent service. REA are the ONLY brokers who willingly disclose our spread of business. I wonder why that is?
4. I have known colleagues who have actually paid a broker €400/500 for the service that others provide for free.
And that should be against the law but sadly isn't as yet.
5. On the point of filling out paperwork, it does become annoying after a while as would paying over the odds for your mortgage every month.
Final point: The more shopping around people do, the more clued in they become as to what their mortgage needs are and how best to satisfy them. When your happy that you have the best deal you can find, you go with that and thats the end of it.
I agree in theory. The problem is that every provider is looking for your business and therefore is not going to show your their products in a true comparison with their competitors. The ethos of REA (given that we do not have an agency with Irish Nationwide and NIB do not have a broker network) is to offer unbiased, professional advice based on the clients individual circumstances and the best fit for those circumstances.
My 2 cents...
And mine!
Sarah