-
If you can research, and do relatively basic maths / excel then you can a probably do it yourself by identifying 1-4 appropriate lenders and calling them.
Why bother though? It's not going to cost you anything and you won't get the commission from the mortgage companies if you do it yourself so I can't see a reason to do it.
aggi-
Because you're suspicious of commission led individuals so you spend ages duplicating all the work, only to end up with the same result. (what we did).
Or because the broker you were looking at charges an upfront fee.
Note that brokers will be often be quoted lower rates than individuals for the same risk profile.
On the flip side, often you'll get cashback / fee discounts that a broker won't get. For eg we would* have got £500 cashback for going direct to NW and my colleague got £1k of fees back from HSBC which made a 2yr fixed cheaper than a 1yr.
Just to be clear, I'm not at all against using brokers. It's just worth pointing out that if you don't have special circumstances then they aren't doing anything you can't do yourself fairly easily and you should double check there recommendation.
*NW actually gave it to us anyway, only made out to us jointly forcing us to get a joint account.
hugo7
If you can research, and do relatively basic maths / excel then you can a probably do it yourself by identifying 1-4 appropriate lenders and calling them.
There is a lot of smoke and mirrors in terms of products and fees, but honestly it really is going to be x4 your combined income.
However, mortgage broker is really good when either; a) you don't want/can't do it yourself, or b) have non-standard circumstances. But if you and your partner are employed PAYE then all the broker is going to do is use an app that filters providers by eligiblity and compares the real net cost of each of them. In a sellers market they often have an additional edge as their relationship with the lenders means that they can get things done more quickly than an individual.