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FSA Issues Warning To Mortgage Lenders

If you are considering taking your CeMAP training at the moment, then you will be particularly interested in what is happening in the mortgage market currently.

As you might be aware, mortgage lenders in the last few years gave mortgages out on up to 125 per cent of a property’s value, up to 6 or more times a person’s salary and now the economy has turned.

This means there are many people struggling to make their mortgage repayments.  Mortgage advisors and financial advisors are in demand to ensure that those coming to the end of their special deals get the best possible deal they can at the moment and to help advise them on how to sort out their finances.

This week the FSA issues a warning, aimed specifically at high-risk and specialist lenders, saying that mortgage lenders will receive heavy fines and be barred from certain markets if they put excessive pressure on home owners who fall behind on their repayments.

As you would learn in your CeMAP training, repossession should be a last resort in any case and a mortgage lender must be able to demonstrate that it has exhausted every other possibility.

The number of home loan arrears has grown by 15 per cent for 2008 up to April and making 302,000 in total.  Repossessions for the first quarter of 2008 rose to 9,152, an increase of 41 per cent.

These figures were released as the nationalised mortgage bank, Northern Rock, a specialist in high-risk loans itself, released figures showing it had repossessed almost 1,500 homes in the first half of 2008.

The Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) still predicts repossessions are likely to rise to 45,000 by the end of this year and insists its members are taking extra steps to help customers.  They are even contacting customers who are coming off their initial special deals and hence moving on to higher rates automatically.  This is a pro-active step that many successful mortgage advisors do, and is a tip we mention in our CeMAP training.

The CML said it was:

“surprised at the FSA’s observations on specialist lenders, who have been working extremely hard to manage arrears.”

One FSA research paper, which is based on experiences related by those in arrears found in a lot of cases that:

“consumers generally arrived at the belief that lenders were not in a position or possibly not willing to take account of personal circumstance”

Many successful mortgage advisors stay in touch with the clients and are able to advise them if they feel they may be getting into difficulty.

The mortgage market is changing at the moment, but there is still a surprising amount of business out there for someone who possesses the good qualities a mortgage advisor needs, i.e. good listening skills, a warm and friendly personality and the capacity to build a good rapport with their clients.  A good CeMAP training course will discuss these qualities and ensure their delegates understand that by supporting clients through difficult times such as these can result in a client for life and a lot of great repeat business.

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