Gross mortgage lending could reach £145bn in 2013 with brokers accounting for a greater proportion of business, says the Association of Mortgage Intermediaries.
The AMI’s quarterly economic bulletin says the FSA’s impending ban on non-advised sales, which will come into force in April 2014 as part of the mortgage market review, along with the government’s New Buy scheme should contribute to a greater proportion of mortgage business going through intermediaries next year.
Sinclair believes lenders will have to adapt to the non-advised sales ban in the coming months, favouring intermediaries as a distribution channel instead of training their own staff to give advice.
In a consultation paper published in December, the FSA proposed that sales must be advised where there is an interaction between the customer and the lender. However, it watered that proposal down in the MMR final rules, published last month, meaning that contract variations such as changing the payment method or rate switches can be carried out on an execution-only basis.