In our recent article about the impact of falling house prices on advisers, we outlined why the current property market means intermediaries like you need to seek out opportunities beyond ‘new business’.

Here, Alex Beavis explains where opportunities lie for your business, and why you need to work smarter to maintain your turnover in a cooling property market – even though interest rates appear to have stopped climbing, for now…

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I’ve spoken to a lot of advisers who are having to work harder to maintain the level of business they’ve become used to in recent years – including some who are spending significant amounts of time seeking out new business.

To use a metaphor: if the tap filling up the bucket is running more slowly, we need to find both new sources of water, and to plug the gaps allowing value to leak away. Here’s how.

New sources of water

Your existing customers will undoubtedly know lots of other people like them, so if you’re not already incentivising referrals, now could be the time to start. You could look, too, at creating partnerships with local estate agents, conveyancers and local IFAs, as another way of driving fresh leads.

Could your services even be a workplace benefit to a local employer? Think laterally about how to create these new connections.

This all said, new business is not the only way to increased income right now. You can spend every spare hour doing business development and marketing, but when external factors mean there are fewer and fewer transactions taking place, eventually you will see diminishing returns.

So some of the most effective business development right now – not to mention the cheapest – is that which you’ve already done. You’ll likely have built up a large database of active customers over recent years, and now is the time to maximise the relationships you’ve already established.

Plugging the holes

As borrowers you’ve placed with lenders approach the end of fixed-rate deals, they will be encouraging borrowers to product-transfer directly, without seeking independent advice.

You might argue this is an effort to prevent borrowers losing the business to another lender. Or, if you were a cynic, you might say this was to avoid having to pay procurement fees to advisers.

Either way,  you need to be proactive to ensure customers benefit from advice and get the best possible deal from the market.

Ensure all potential outcomes are fulfilled

In addition to advising on their product transfer, there are other opportunities you can find with every customer.

For many, the events of recent years – not to mention the current financial climate – have illustrated life’s unpredictability. These have brought the value and importance of protections into sharp focus for more customers than ever.

And with the new obligations to ensure customers are protected against foreseeable harm, every one of you should be having a protection conversation evert time, no matter what the transaction.

Even if you don’t write the business yourself and refer it elsewhere, this can bring in an income for you – whether through protection, complex or specialist lending, or general insurance.

How to position this with your clients

Using the upcoming end of their current deal as a trigger, you may want to reach out to customers in your database and offer them a sort of ‘Homeowner Finance MOT’, with the aim of ensuring they’re ‘ready for the twists and turns of the road ahead’.

To stretch the metaphor a little, you might like to think of yourself as a mechanic for their finances – helping to ensure they’ve got both the right ‘vehicle’ (i.e. secured borrowing and protections) for their particular ‘journey’, and that it’s in optimum condition.

Refinance hub

We have created lots of resources to support these conversations in our Refinance Hub.

And don’t forget to check out our new Estimated Revenue Calculator, which illustrates the size of the prize if you adjust your approach.