Was a mortgage broker worth it, or did they just send you wherever their panel pays best? First Home

Mine was worth it purely for the paperwork. First purchase, ten weeks out, and having one person chase the lender, the solicitor and my employer's HR for the letter meant I was not taking calls at work every second day. I have no idea whether I got the best rate available and I stopped caring somewhere in week six.

Look past the headline rate at the terms, because that is where the differences hide and where a good broker actually helps. Prepayment allowances, whether the penalty on breaking is calculated one way or another, portability if you move, and whether it is a collateral charge that makes switching lenders later expensive. I took a slightly higher rate for far better break terms and it saved me thousands when I moved after three years.

Broker got me 0.4 percentage points below my bank's first offer and then my bank matched it when I told them, which tells you what the bank's first offer was worth. The useful thing was not the rate itself, it was having a written competing offer to put in front of them. Whether you get that from a broker or from phoning three lenders yourself is a question of how much of your own time ten weeks of admin is worth.

Where brokers earn their keep is complicated files — self-employed, recent job change, unusual property, thin credit history — because they know which lender says yes to what and you will not. On a clean salaried file with 15% down, most lenders want you, and the value drops a lot. Yours is the case where doing it yourself is most viable.

Terse: get a written quote from the broker, take it to your bank, take whichever is better. Costs you an afternoon. Anything file-specific, ask a mortgage professional rather than us.