The Faceless Bureau

dishonest brokering

By Broker Rage
A Consumer
January 20, 2021
3 Min read
Add comment
d

My wife and I just bought a new apartment and sold our old one. We sold our old home just one month after buying the new one.

We used a mortgage broker who was supposed to organise everything. As I understand it, the main purpose of mortgage brokers is to help people navigate complicated processes and multiple providers to:

  1. find the best loan to meet their client’s needs
  2. make getting a loan easier and more painless by helping with paperwork and liaising with the lender
  3. provide good service, especially since all of their business comes from referrals!

We had our loans set up, but when we looked at our bank accounts, we couldn’t see the loan accounts. We could only see the bridging finance loan (at a much higher interest rate) that should disappear as soon as our old home was sold, just a few weeks after we bought the new one.

But the bridging finance remained in place for weeks after the sale of our old home. When we asked our broker what was going on, he blamed the bank and said we just had to wait. We contacted him again, with the same result.

We started to suspect that the broker might be doing nothing at all.

I finally bypassed the broker, walked into a branch of the bank, and explained my problem. They told me that the broker was supposed to notify them to close the bridging loan and establish the loan account, but hadn’t done it. We also discovered that the broker had put the wrong amount on the loan account papers, even though the right amount was on the loan application we had signed and the offer letter from the bank.

The people in the branch were very helpful! It was great! They fixed everything within about 15 minutes … very different from the broker who was just ignoring my calls and emails.

This begs the question of what value the broker was adding. He didn’t make the process easy for us, and he certainly didn’t provide better service than the bank. At best, maybe he was like a very slow and unresponsive loan comparison website. If a broker is just another layer of bureaucracy between me and the lender, and one that doesn’t work very well, why is there a vast industry of brokers who are supposed to help people navigate the vast industry of lenders.

I’m sure we’re not the only people to have similar experiences. I’m also sure we’re not the only people to get an email from their broker a few months later asking for referrals to potential clients. Ha! I will be referring my friends and family directly to my lender.

Add comment

Read more

Cut out the middleman

By Involuntary Administrator
A Consumer
3 Min read
C

I am a local business owner in a small town. A typhoon recently hit the island where my business is and left massive flooding in our area. My home and parts of my business have been submerged in water for days, and I expect to spend a lot of money on repairs to get my business back in operation after the flood subsides. My employees, all 20 of them, live in homes affected by the flood and they need help from the government to recover. The way that works here is through social security system calamity loans. The government provides a temporary loan to help people in a crisis and those people...

Read on

Unrequitable requirement

By attentive reader
A Consumer
3 Min read
U

We wanted to add a second director to the ASIC Registry for our company.  Having just one director means no backup in an emergency, so adding a second would reduce our company’s risk profile. The company has a bank loan secured by a mortgage on our office, and has been making the required payments for over a year.  The loan documents say that the bank must approve in writing any change to the directors of the company. So I rang the bank to find out the process. Sam at the call centre agrees that an additional director will reduce the loan’s risk.  She says I will need to go to local branch to...

Read on

three car shuffle

By Gridlocked
A Consumer
2 Min read
t

How annoying are overland easements! And neighbours! And local planning politics! My house shares a driveway with another house.  My house is at the back, and theirs is at the front, so I have to drive past their house to park on my property. The driveway was built after  the subdivision of our two blocks by the previous owners of the other house, who were lovely people and excellent neighbours, but who sold their home late last year. To make things extra complicated, the land the driveway was built on was not originally privately owned. It was public land, which I guess belongs to the local...

Read on

rubbish policy

By rubbish protester
A Consumer
2 Min read
r

Get a load of this garbage: I own and run a company – a small business with about 20 staff – and we work out of a huge office building in a big city. We’ve been based here for a few years now, and we’ve always used the cleaning and rubbish collection service run by building management. My part-time Office Manager forwarded me an email from building management on Thursday, which had arrived the previous day when the Office Manager was out of the office. The email said they’d be cutting off the rubbish collection service the following week. So our final collection would be the following day...

Read on
By Broker Rage January 20, 2021
Add comment
The Faceless Bureau

Recent Posts