Tell me about mortgage brokers

[senua]

DD is thinking about buying her first home. It's a long time since I last got a mortgage so my advice is out of date.
Brokers used work for 'free' and lived off commission from the mortgage provider. I think that that has been stopped so now you pay the broker a fee. Except that some brokers are still free? If you pay a fee, do they pass on the commission to you?
What's normal these days? And recommendations, horror stories etc.

We used The Mortgage People.
They are great for first time buyers.
Found us a mortgage and we had some tricky circumstances (think self employed type plus maternity leave)
You pay them a flat fee of £500 once they have got an offer for you.
I think they get £500 from the lender too.
If it falls through they don't charge you again even if it takes ages to find new property.

They even recommended a solicitor that specialized in our type of buy and was so speedy the whole process was done in 6 weeks from viewing to completion!

Ours was free, think they got a fee from the bank we went with for us taking a mortgage with them but we paid nothing to the broker. Got much more favourable rates than we managed to get ourselves on the high street and they helped with the whole application process and were a point of contact. We've used the same guy twice now but is local rather than national so not sure a recommendation is much help in this case. I imagine most independent brokers operate the same way

bump

Some are still free, and receive a commission from the lender. Some you pay for - they still typically get a commission from the lender though that isn't passed along to you.

We are paying for our broker as we have a less than typical situation and knew we'd need someone to help us get a loan (otherwise we fall into the 'computer immediately says no' group). He came very, very highly recommended and so far has done a great job - he went to meet with the local branch manager of our lender to plead our case and got her to agree to a loan etc before submitting the request online so our credit files didn't get hit several times by requests. Now all we need is for someone to put their flippin' house on the market so we can buy it!

I won't begrudge him his fee at all. He's earned it several times over already. Plus it's nice to have someone as a point of contact for those daft questions that suddenly occur to you when you're a buyer.

Our broker is well worth the money and we've used his firm twice now.

We liaised with him from December to March when we went under offer so that we were fully briefed regarding affordability and interest rates.

We paid the £200 fee once we received our mortgage offer.

Brokers used work for 'free' and lived off commission from the mortgage provider. I think that that has been stopped so now you pay the broker a fee.

No it hasn't been stopped. Some still work for commission from the lender.