The Money Revolution by Anne Boden

Author:Anne Boden [Anne Boden]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kogan Page
Published: 2019-05-02T08:11:51+00:00

Notes

1 Aviva [accessed 13 February 2013] Ten most common claims made against home insurance policies: list [Online] www.aviva.co.uk

2 MoneySupermarket data from quotes between January and March 2018

CHAPTER EIGHT

Pay off your mortgage

There is a reason why buying a house regularly tops polls of the most stressful life events, surpassing other gruelling milestones such as divorce, bereavement and losing a job. Dealing with solicitors, waiting for paperwork for weeks, even months, fearing that the sale could collapse at any moment and constantly chasing estate agents for updates all make for a pretty traumatic period. The void of information that amplifies a would-be homebuyer’s feeling of desperation feels even worse today when set against the bountiful status alerts in nearly all other aspects of our daily lives. Delivery companies let us see the progress of our packages every step of the way, and we can even reschedule or redirect a package en route. Order a pizza and there’ll be multiple alerts on its expected arrival time. Numerous retailers have live support links to qualified personnel who are there to help you with even the tiniest, most trivial query.

So why can’t borrowers get the same sort of service from the companies they work with in order to secure what will be one of the most important purchases of their lives?

For many years, the only notable technological advances in the house-buying market centred around property portals. Yet, while search engines such as Zoopla and Rightmove certainly made the process of searching for the perfect home a lot easier, the next stage in the process of actually buying the chosen property has remained largely unchanged for decades. The mortgage market certainly appears to have remained blissfully unaware of the internet boom, bar introducing the most basic of digital facilities.

In fairness to the mortgage industry, there is a plausible argument why it hasn’t been easy to move towards offering a better experience to customers. Buying a house is a remarkably complex process. There are numerous documents to review, regulations to heed and decisions that require input from all directions. If pressed, lenders would no doubt say they simply don’t make enough money out of selling mortgages to justify getting in the numbers of staff that would be required to markedly improve the customer experience.

There is another reason why progress has been slow too. While nearly everyone would attest to the fact that the buying-a-home experience is one of the worst they’ve ever endured, the hardship is generally quickly forgotten once a homebuyer gets the keys to the front door and finds their kettle from in among their packing cases. After that, most people barely engage with their mortgage company. In fact, nearly half the population access their mortgage account less than once a year.1 With such low engagement levels there has been little impetus for change. Put simply, no one has really complained very loudly, therefore nothing has been done.

Of course, this status quo was never going to last and certainly not in the very different, hyper-connected, extremely communicative world we find ourselves in today.

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