Some quick reads from where I sit running The Mortgage Hut, Police Mortgages and Pagaro. None of this is advice. All of it is what I'm telling my own teams.
Specialist lending is no longer specialist. The "specialist" label used to mean policemen, airline crew, expats, sub-prime. Today it means almost anyone outside a vanilla PAYE employment box — which is most of the population. Brokerages still pretending to be vanilla shops are going to lose share to the ones who built specialist desks five years ago.
Service is the moat, not technology. Every mortgage tech founder thinks the moat is the platform. It isn't. The moat is what happens at 9 p.m. when a client's solicitor messages saying the survey came back odd. Tech makes good service scale. It doesn't replace it. Pagaro is built around that distinction.
The Middle East matters more than UK brokers think. UK lender appetite for Gulf-resident buyers is recovering quietly. International desks at the major banks are staffing up again. If you've never built a referral relationship with a Dubai or Riyadh broker, this is the year to start.
The thing people overestimate? Rate-cut headlines. Borrowing costs will probably ease through the year, but client behaviour responds to monthly payments, not to bank rate. We've spent fifteen years reminding clients (and ourselves) that the affordability conversation is the only conversation that matters.
More to come — including a longer piece on how I'm thinking about the next venture.