Advisers still vital to the mortgage market

According to the IMLA, advisers facilitate consumer choice and foster competition and have played a vital role in helping customers find the right mortgage deal.

The association says that the proportion of mortgages that originated through the intermediary sector has risen to more than 75 per cent in the first quarter of 2008, from around 25 per cent 20 years ago.

IMLA’s executive director Peter Williams said: "The growth of the mortgage adviser and the emergence of the specialist lender with no branch network and wholesale funding changed everything.

"It is clear that IMLA's members and membership could not have flourished without the intermediary sector."

Despite the difficult market, Williams insists mortgage brokers continue to play an important role in helping customers source loans, regardless of the possibility that some lenders favour their own branch network over the intermediary channel.

"The intermediary is an essential part of the landscape of the market – key to both customer choice and to maintaining a competitive market.

"The market will return and a robust intermediary sector will be essential, particularly given the still substantial choice of products and the need for customers to be properly advised in both the TCF environment and in a more testing housing market," Williams added.

To comment on this topic read the Speakers' Corner blog on 'Treating brokers fairly'.