Brokers and lenders need to do more to ensure consumers are aware of the specialist lending sector, Louisa Sedgwick has said.
The director of sales at Vida Homeloans said consumers were more familiar with the traditional mortgage products but less so with specialist ones.
She said: "A customer might well be used to walking into a high street branch of a well-known bank or building society and being turned down, and then they just assume that they are going to be a forever tenant.
"We need to think about how we better educate the consumer to understand that they can have the house of their choice or the home of their dreams.
"We are seeing some more mainstream lenders entering into the specialist world and I don't think that's a bad thing, because it educates the consumer into understanding that they can have a mortgage and we are not going back 10-12 years when mortgages were less available."
She said the economic climate was leading to uncertainty among consumers, but Ms Sedgwick predicted they would eventually get "fed up" of this uncertainty and would "just get on with it".
Ms Sedgwick said the growth of specialist lending had been driven by the increasing number of lenders moving into the sector which had driven up choice.
She added that more and more consumers were finding themselves with impaired credit.
damian.fantato@ft.com
