FAQs

• Not all advisors are created equal. There is a wide range of quality in the market, and your chances of approval, whether for the best deals or simply for approval at all, can depend greatly on which advisor you speak to.
• We are one of the UK’s longest-standing and leading impartial watchdogs. We are capable of matching you with the perfect advisor from a network of fully vetted, verified, and monitored experts.
• The value we add lies in testing, trialling, and training mortgage experts based on their specific skills and experience. This enables us to match borrowers with advisors who have proven themselves to be among the best in the UK at providing assistance.

To illustrate this, consider the difference between seeing a GP and consulting a specialist heart surgeon. While a GP might identify a heart problem, if surgery is required, a specialist is needed – someone who performs heart surgeries daily. For such a serious matter, you would want the best in the country – someone with extensive experience, and capable of performing surgeries with precision and expertise. That’s why our business exists: to match you with a specialist expert, not just a general practitioner.

• We analyse the info you provide and match it with the perfect advisor/firm based on their experience and skill set. They give you a call, provide a free consultation, and you decide if you want to proceed before committing to anything. There will be no obligation to take things further and your credit report won’t be affected. Our mortgage broker-matching service is 100% free for you to use. 
• We’ve spent over a decade assembling, vetting, verifying and reviewing the advisors we work with to make sure they are the very best in the market (we actually say no and reject a very high percentage of advisors who want to work with our customers). 

One of our USPs is being available online 24/7. Typically within 2-5 minutes. This may vary depending on demand and availability of course. If you’ve not been matched within 20 minutes please let us know.

• It can be within 20 minutes, but also a few days – This depends entirely on your situation and how ready you are.
• Simple applications can happen live on the phone. More complex cases sometimes need additional levels of documentation and for your expert to package your application in as strong a manner as possible, so it has the best chance of approval by the underwriting team. The best experts have direct access to these underwriters and can chat through to ensure everything is acceptable before applying (saving HOURS, and dramatically increasing the chance of approval).
• If you have everything ready (credit report, paperwork, proof of income, ID etc.), then it can be much quicker than from a standing start.

• We’ve spent over a decade assembling, vetting, verifying and reviewing the advisors we work with to make sure they are the very best in the market (we actually say no and reject a very high % of advisors who want to work with our customers). 
• AdvisorScore: We run our own AdvisorScore program – an industry-first – that allows our borrowers to review performance at multiple touch-points across your mortgage journey, from enquiry to completion and beyond. This ensures we remain impartial, and that our network is policed by the people who matter – our amazing customers! We consider ourselves as an essential financial watchdog, and we’re here for you if you need us in the unlikely event of something going wrong – we’ve got you.
• Due Diligence: We also conduct incredibly strict due diligence to ensure the likelihood of something going wrong is minimal – as well as establishing quality in terms of experience, skill and ability, we verify the FCA status and financial status (using Experian credit referencing).
• Lender access/strike-offs/complaints: We ensure all advisors are whole-of-market and have not had any strike-offs from any lender panels. We also request information on any complaints and won’t work with advisors who have shown any reason to not be capable, competent, or working in customers’ best interests.
• Charter: Advisors sign a charter to confirm their pledge to upholding Online Mortgage Advisor’s vision and values, in meeting strict service levels and treating every customer like family.
• Academy: We also have the UK’s first specialist mortgage advice academy, accredited by the LIBF, which seeks to train and support advisors to understand the specialist mortgage market in a way that is absent from the industry.

We are so confident in our service, we guarantee it – If you are rejected by an OMA® advisor and then get approved elsewhere, we pay you £100. In the years we’ve had this live, not one single person has claimed it! More on this here (T&Cs apply).

Advisors and brokers are the same thing. BUT – We prefer advisors. Why? Well it suits our business name better, but actually, it’s more aligned with our values – advisors help guide the borrower to the right advice regardless of the outcome or what’s in it for them (whereas the term “broker” feels more aligned with “doing a deal”).

• Advisors first fully explore and understand the customer’s situation, only then can they begin to provide the right advice on the most appropriate solution. 
• They have accounts with lenders, and tools that let them search through the market to find the best deals. 
• Their job is basically to find you the best deal, based on A) what you want and what best matches this, and B) what you are eligible for.

Note that some advisors are not what they should be – the market is not great when it comes to consistency. Based on our research, the same borrower going to multiple brokers is 45% likely to get a different recommendation, costing on average £45,000 over the life of the mortgage – so don’t get it wrong! Pick the right expert for you.

• All regulated advisors MUST have FCA approval to provide advice, and this is predicated on having the requisite qualifications. The main professional qualification required to office unsupervised advice is to be CeMap qualified (1, 2 and 3), as well as other financial service qualifications such as those of IFAs. You can read more on this here.
• OMA® Advisors all have the required FCA qualifications and authorisations but are not required to do any additional qualifications per se.
• That said, the due diligence we run (see more how we vet/verify advisors) ensures they have the experience and skills, and pass due diligence in a way that is not required anywhere else in the industry.

• We have a thorough vetting and verification process to make sure we only work with advisors who meet a high standard in the first instance. We have long-standing relationships with some of the best, most decorated and award-winning advisors in the UK.
• We also run our own AdvisorScore and advisors know their customers will be reviewing them throughout their journey, so they are always on their toes and incentivised to do a great job, and be really nice!

More than that though, the main value we add is in our impartiality, and in our Experience matching process – we analyse customer enquiry data and introduce them to the right advisors, with proven knowledge, expertise, and recent success in the type of mortgage required.

Yes and no.

No, in the sense that they don’t have their own funds or exclusive access that no other broker has. Yes, in the sense that they have exclusive access to lenders and mortgages that many other brokers don’t have. The market is huge (about 125 lenders currently), most brokers only access about 80 of these, and regularly use about 20.

We explain the reason for this being like the difference between going to a GP or a specialist heart surgeon. Your GP might be able to identify you have a problem with your heart, but if you need surgery, you need a specialist – someone who operates on hearts every day. And for something as serious as this, you’d want the best in the country – someone who has done thousands of them, who can do it blindfolded, who writes the book on it. That’s why we exist as a business – to match you with the specialist expert, not the GP.

Also, as well as having access to a massive range of lenders and products, many OMA® firms have direct access to exclusive clubs and underwriting teams in lenders, which are only afforded to the “inner circle” of specialists that support them with a lot of business – this means better service, and a higher chance of approval – often able to get “policy exceptions” where approvals are granted when they would normally be declined, even at times when they have been declined by another broker previously.

• We have a close panel of expert firms we’ve spent over a decade assessing and building relationships with, across a wide range of different disciplines and mortgage types. 
• We don’t publish a list of experts, we will match you and share their details with you at this point. This helps us remain impartial – If we did it any other way, we’d have loads of customers enquiring with firms directly and we’d not get credit for the introduction and therefore, would make no money!
• If you’re worried about this or would like to not be referred to any firm specifically, please get in touch and we can work something out for you in a bespoke manner.

• We have hundreds of advisors in firms all over the UK. Mortgage Advisors are required to be on UK soil to provide regulated advice under FCA guidelines.
• As we are a remote and online business, your advisor is not tied geographically and can help you regardless of your location. This means you are matched based on the best advisor for the job, rather than the advisor closest to your postcode (which some of our competitors seem to think is more valuable!).
• That said, if you’d prefer a face-to-face appointment with an expert close to you, this can be arranged – please reach out to us directly to organise this.

• All firms and situations are different.
• Anything from Zero to £thousands – this depends on your situation, the type of finance you need, and the complexity of your application.
• Some straightforward residential and buy-to-let applications can be simple and done with no, or low fees, whereas some complex adverse credit, commercial or bridging finance applications can be more complicated and warrant a larger fee into the hundreds or on rare occasions, thousands. 
• As a pure guide, a typical fee structure to expect for residential borrowers might be something like:
  • Simple (employed, clean credit etc.) = £199
  • Mid-complexity (self-employed, light credit issues) = £499
  • High-complexity (complex income, heavy credit issues) = £999

• All OMA® firms and advisors sign up to our fair fee policy, which means they have to offer a no-obligation, fee-free, initial consultation.
• When fees become payable differ from firm to firm. Some charge a portion of their fee as a refundable amount before making an application (to help them cover costs of time etc. and to be happy you are committed to progressing), refunded if they are not able to get you approved. Others charge after application, when the mortgage is fully approved, on completion of the mortgage etc.

We are paid by the advisor firm for the introduction. More on this here

• Not necessarily – this depends on your situation. Specialist mortgage lenders can have deals akin to the best deals on the high street, and deals that are more expensive to cover the increased risk of lending to someone with a non-standard situation.
• If you have a particularly higher risk application such as higher loan to value (smaller deposit), credit issues, complex income, or a non-standard property, then it’s more likely the lenders that will consider you and the products you’re eligible for will be more expensive as the lender has to price the risk of you not repaying into that arrangement. This might be a higher rate or a higher lender application fee.
  

• There is truly only one way to find this out, and that is to have an expert calculate it with lenders across the whole market.
• Typical mortgage calculators will show you a range (most are wrong), and present something like 4x of your annual salary. Our calculators are slightly more advanced and give a range depending on lender type – up to 6x income to reflect some specialist lenders. This gives a pretty good guide.
• BUT – Even our calculators won’t be exact for you. Until your specific income type, amount, outgoings, credit history, and all other factors have been considered to determine which lenders will lend to you, and at what level, you won’t get an accurate figure – Your expert will help here.

• All lenders have a range in generosity (some lend 3x you income, some 6x or more), all lenders also have different policy on what income they consider (some accept 100% overtime / shift pay / bonus etc, some 50% others 0%), and all lenders also have different policy on what outgoings you have and how they impact what you can afford (some deduct differently for credit cards, loans, childcare, and pension contributions etc).
• The only way to get an accurate figure for what you can borrow is to have your expert review the market for you.