Owning your own home

My IFA never charges but gets some back end commission from the products he sells.
Last time he had to recommend a First Direct mortgage as best. So he made nothing.
He DEFINITELY had access to more deals than were on moneysupermarket.com etc... but not by much.

Frankly for £650 on a c.£100k mortgage I would do the work myself.
You are going to have to do the paperwork anyway.
All he does is give it the once over to make sure you have filled in the right boxes (sort of like the Post Office passport application check service).
And then he can chase the application while the bank sits on it for days, loses the paperwork, send paperwork to the wrong address etc...

As long as you have a plain vanilla application (i.e. not self-cert or self-employed...) moneysupermarket will tell you the best deal and you can apply direct.

I mean £650 seems a lot for not much to me.
I would FAR rather plug that into a proper survey.

We're using the in-house broker from the agent we're buying through. He's charging us £99 but gets commission from the lender we go with. For the guidance he's given us, and the time he's spent going through stuff with us, i'm surprised he's not charging us more (£250's his top price). We're out in the 'burbs so he won't be much use to most people on here.

He doesn't try to push us to certain lenders and genuinely seems to want to find the right one for us.

We've just been refused by Nationwide due to the Survey results. :-(
So he's seeing what he can do at the moment.