No matter which way you cut it, finance is a specialist industry. You need specific knowledge and years of experience to properly navigate the financial world and find the right products. It’s one of the reasons we’re so emphatic that any business looking for finance has a broker. However, even in specialised fields, some are still doubting the ability of those involved, as could be seen at the Finance Professional Show last month.
Now, that article makes some good points about how you can’t conflate the residential and commercial mortgage markets. It also has sound thoughts about how some banks acting on their own can have a tendency to not recognise just how diverse these markets are. But for our part, we don’t agree with the assertion that there’s a lack of skills in the commercial mortgage space – it’s more about access to those skills for clients that makes things difficult.
In “the old days”, getting a commercial mortgage was perhaps one of the easiest types of business finance. If you had security, all you needed to do was stroll into your local bank, speak with the mortgage manager, and a few hours and a sensible idea later, you strolled out with a mortgage. Every bank had an easily available mortgage expert in their local branch, so every client knew they had experienced advice to hand. In the modern world, though, getting ahold of those experts is significantly harder. The layers of bureaucracy that surround the financial process make getting their advice and opinion near-impossible for the average punter. That’s another important reason to have a broker on your side, since they can open the door to the right people to talk to. The experts are very much still there, and they’re not going anywhere, but they’ve been hidden from sight. There might be a need for more of them in the future, but they’re definitely there and available.
There’s definitely an issue with access to experienced resources when applying for finance for your business. But we shouldn’t confuse a lack of access with those resources not existing.
