by Jenny Ruth
However, he does acknowledge that SBS would prefer to deal with customers directly rather than through a mortgage broker.
"If you attract customers through third parties, it makes it very difficult to develop a long term relationship," he says.
He says SBS advertises that it charges 0.5% of a loan up to a maximum of $1,200 as an application fee but that individual staff members have the discretion to waive this fee.
If a customer is bringing a full banking relationship to SBS, the staff member could waive all fees.
Atkinson declines to say how many of SBS’s customers are charged fees. "It depends on the relationship they’re bringing to us," he says.
Atkinson says that, unlike most banking institutions in New Zealand, SBS is owned by its customers. "We’re not an overseas bank."
About 20% of SBS home loans are originated from mortgage brokers compared to brokers’ overall market share of between 25% and 30%.
Atkinson says he’s aware of one incident of a broker’s client being told they wouldn’t have incurred fees if they hadn’t dealt with a mortgage broker. That client was given incorrect information, he says.
SBS isn’t anti-mortgage brokers, he says. " They’ve got a job to do. They’ve got a place in the market. We have no difficulty with mortgage brokers."
While SBS has a number of localised arrangements with mortgage brokers, the only national aggregator it has an agreement with is Mortgage Link. "We have many, many individual agreements with brokers which we work with locally. They’ve established quite strong relationships with the local branches," Atkinson says.
A number of mortgage brokers report having been told by their local SBS representatives that their clients will be charged an additional fee, "Any brokerage paid will be on-charged to the customer, without fail," one mortgage broker reports his local SBS representative as having told him.
Given that situation, Good Returns asked why that mortgage broker would ever place a client’s home loan with SBS. "They’re a lender of last resort. They will lend where there are credit issues or where the loan is difficult," one broker says.
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