By business type
Where an assistant helps a mortgage broker, and where rates become a liability
Mortgage enquiries arrive with one of two questions attached: what will it cost me, and can I actually borrow that much. Neither has a general answer, and the first carries a trap the other trades in this family do not face, because a rate is true on the morning it is published and wrong by the afternoon. Everything else, which is most of the traffic, an assistant handles well.
What people actually type
Not the questions on your FAQ page. These are the phrasings that arrive in a chat window, lowercase and unpunctuated, and the material has to answer them in those words rather than in yours.
- how much can i borrow
- what rate can i get
- do you charge a broker fee
- what documents do i need for an application
- how long does an application take
- do you deal with self employed applicants
- will an enquiry affect my credit score
- can i get a mortgage with bad credit
- do you do buy to let
- how much deposit do i need
- can i book a free initial chat
- how soon can i get a decision in principle
What to feed it
In rough order of how much work each one takes off the front desk. Every one of these is a document you almost certainly already have.
| Your fee structure and exactly when a fee becomes payable | Whether you charge, how much, whether it is taken at application or on offer, whether it is refundable if the case does not complete, and how lender procuration fees sit alongside it. Disclosure duties in most markets require this to be clear up front, and it is the question every enquirer wants settled before they engage. |
|---|---|
| The document checklist for an application | Identification, proof of address, payslips or accounts, bank statements and the periods each must cover, deposit evidence and its source. This is high volume, entirely factual, and gathering it early is the biggest single determinant of how fast a case runs. |
| How the process runs, stage by stage | Initial call, decision in principle, full application, valuation, offer, exchange, completion, and a realistic sense of what each stage is waiting on. Most anxious mid case questions are really questions about which stage they are at and what normal looks like. |
| Which applicant types you actually place | Self employed, contractors, adverse credit, later life, expatriate, complex income, buy to let and portfolio landlords. Whether you can help a given profile is a fixed fact about your permissions and your lender panel, and answering it fast prevents a wasted appointment on both sides. |
| What happens to somebody's credit file | The difference between a soft check at the enquiry stage and a hard footprint at application, and at what point in your process each occurs. Applicants worry about this more than brokers expect, and a clear answer removes a real hesitation before the first call. |
| Your data handling and consent wording | What you collect, why, who it is shared with (lenders, insurers, valuers) and how long you hold it. Mortgage applications involve unusually sensitive financial data, and the assistant should be able to answer a data question without improvising. |
What has to reach a person
How much somebody can borrow
Affordability is a lender by lender calculation over income type, income structure, commitments, dependants, credit profile, term and stress rates, and two lenders can differ by a wide margin on the same applicant. There is no generic answer, and a number produced by a widget will be treated as one and repeated to an estate agent.
The right handling is to say that affordability depends on the lender and the full picture, that this is exactly what the initial call is for, and to offer to arrange it.
What rate somebody will get
This is the biggest risk in this entry. Rates change frequently and products are withdrawn at short notice, so any indexed page listing rates starts going out of date the moment it is uploaded. An assistant quoting last month's rate is not slightly wrong, it is telling somebody that something better exists than does.
Either keep rates out of the indexed material entirely, or keep them on a single maintained page and have the assistant state clearly that products change daily and must be confirmed. Uploaded rate documents are the version of this that goes stale silently.
Anything about a live application
Where the case is, why the valuation has not happened, whether the offer has been issued. Timelines slip for reasons specific to the lender and the file, and a reassuring guess from an assistant becomes a complaint when it turns out to be wrong.
Whether a particular credit issue is a problem
Defaults, arrears, a payment plan, a recent search, a thin file. Lenders treat these very differently, and the same event can be fatal at one lender and irrelevant at another. Confirm that you work with adverse credit if you do, then hand over.
The wording when it cannot help
This is the message the assistant returns when nothing in the material covers the question. It is written by you rather than generated, which matters here more than anywhere: it is the sentence a stranger reads at the worst moment.
I cannot tell you how much you could borrow or what rate you would get, because that depends on the lender and your full circumstances, and products change daily. I can explain our fees, the documents you will need, how the process runs and who we can help. Leave your name and email and an adviser will call you.
It names what it cannot do, gives the route that can, and offers to take a message. A refusal that only apologises leaves the person exactly where they started.
Rules and duties that shape the answer
Advising on a mortgage is a regulated activity in most markets
Recommending a specific product to a specific borrower generally requires authorisation, and carries suitability duties, record keeping and liability that attach to the firm. An assistant is not authorised and cannot make the assessment that duty assumes.
Keep the indexed material describing your service and your process rather than describing which product suits which borrower, and the boundary largely enforces itself.
Financial promotion rules cover anything that looks like a rate
Where you are regulated, communications about credit typically have to be clear, fair and not misleading, and quoting a rate can pull in requirements about representative examples and accompanying information. An assistant that lifts a headline number off a page and repeats it without its conditions is exactly the failure those rules describe.
A stale document here has a cost attached
In most trades an out of date page is embarrassing. Here it can send somebody to an estate agent with a borrowing figure or a rate that no longer exists, and the correction lands after they have already made an offer. Treat rate and criteria material as perishable, and index the maintained page rather than a copy of it.
Never, whatever the documents say
Out of bounds
- How much a particular person can borrow.
- What rate or product somebody would be offered.
- Whether a specific credit history will be accepted by a lender.
- Whether a property or a case will pass valuation or underwriting.
- Anything about the status of a live application.
Playbooks for this trade
One page per recurring question, written for a mortgage broker rather than in general. Each carries the phrasings, the material that answers them, a reply worth copying, and the line where it has to stop.
- What a broker charges, and what a lender charges, kept apartIndexed rate material is the fastest rotting content a broker can publish. How to answer what rate can i get without repeating last month's.
- Getting an initial call arranged without touching the calendarThe assistant cannot take a slot. It can remove every reason somebody hesitates to book one, then hand a warm enquiry to an adviser.
- The document list that decides how fast a mortgage case runsPayslips, accounts, bank statements and deposit evidence, with the periods each has to cover. The most durable material on a broker's site.
- Erasure requests, and the records a broker may still have to keepMortgage enquiries leave unusually sensitive records in several places. What the assistant explains about erasure, and what it must not promise.
- How much can i borrow, and why it goes straight to a personAffordability is assessed lender by lender, and a figure from a widget gets repeated to an estate agent. The trigger and the wording.
- Four separate bills, and a visitor trying to total themThe broker fee, the lender's product fee, the valuation fee and the conveyancing arrive from different places, and only one of them is ours.
- Two payments on one case, and only one arrives as a documentA fee falling due when the offer is issued, and a procuration fee the lender pays on completion which has to be disclosed but is never billed.
- A client wants to stop, and the offer is already on the tableAn offer carries an expiry date and a conveyancer is holding a completion date. Withdrawing touches three parties and reaches none of them from here.
- Three complaints arrive on one website and one of them is yoursA declined application, a low valuation and slow service are three complaints with three destinations, and only one of them is the firm's.
- Open until eight, and nothing can be submitted after fiveAdvisers take evening calls after the lender desks have shut, and products get withdrawn overnight. An hours page here runs on two clocks.
- The address on the site is rarely the address anybody needsMost mortgage advice never happens in a room, so where are you usually means do I have to come in and where do original documents go.
- The portal is where the access problem is, not the front doorThe upload step is the barrier, the fact find runs long, and a joint applicant cannot be spoken for unless the firm has recorded it.
- An estate agency wants to know how the firm holds a client's paperworkIntroducers vet the firms they refer to. The questions are about payslips, statements and identity documents sitting together in one place.
- The cover a lender insists on, and the cover that is a second appointmentBuildings cover is a lender condition with a deadline. Life cover is a separate regulated sale. Neither gets advised on in a chat window.
- Money paid on a mortgage case that went nowhereA down valuation, a decline or a collapsed chain. Whether money comes back depends which fee it was and whether the firm ever held it.
- The upload link has stopped working and the case is waiting on itExpired upload links, joint applicants sharing one login, and a portal that holds what was sent rather than what the lender has decided.
- The question every applicant asks, and the one nothing here can seeThe most asked question on a broker's site is the one with no visible answer. Publish what each stage waits on instead of a status.
- The work between a first conversation and anything reaching a lenderThe fact find, the consent to a credit search and the document gather. A product transfer, a remortgage and a purchase run it at three lengths.
Questions
- Can we publish rates and let it answer from them?
- You can, but it is the one thing here we would advise against. Rates move constantly, and an assistant will quote a withdrawn product with complete confidence. If you must, keep them on one page you update rather than in an uploaded document, and word the page so the assistant repeats that products change daily.
- Affordability is our most asked question. Is there nothing it can do?
- It can do the useful half: explain that affordability is assessed lender by lender, describe what affects it, list the income evidence you need, and offer the call. What it must not do is produce a figure, because the figure is what gets repeated to a seller.
- Does it book the appointment?
- It does not write into a diary. It answers the questions that stop somebody booking, then collects a name, an email and a message when they ask for a person, which arrives with your team.
- What is the highest value thing to index?
- The document checklist. It is asked before every case, it does not change with the market, and applicants who arrive with the right paperwork are the ones whose cases complete quickly.
Keep reading
- For a law firmFee structures, consultation terms and onboarding checks are answerable. Anything applied to a caller's own facts is legal advice.
- For a accounting firmDeadlines drive the volume. What an accountancy practice can automate, and why no answer may touch a caller's own numbers.
- For a insurance brokerProduct information is safe ground. A personal recommendation is regulated, and no assistant may confirm whether a loss is covered.
- Every business typeWhat an assistant has to know before it can answer for a trade.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.