Complex income is the new normal, and we all need to adjust

The profile of the average mortgage applicant has shifted considerably over the past decade. Where lenders and brokers once dealt largely with straightforward employed applicants and clean financial histories, today's applicant pipeline often looks very different.

Contractors and zero-hour workers, gig workers, self-employed professionals – these applicants are no longer the exception. They represent a growing and economically significant segment of buyers, many of whom are highly creditworthy but routinely underserved by a process that wasn't built with them in mind.

The challenge isn't only that individual complex criteria points may apply – it's that these complexities layer across one another. An applicant could be a contractor, or have two jobs, or be a foreign national, or only have two years’ credit history. Each factor alone is manageable, but take these together, and lenders start to get twitchy. As it stands, these applicants require brokers who can layer criteria fluently and identify lenders with genuine appetite across all of them simultaneously.

This is where the market still has room to mature. Too often, complex cases are declined at the first hurdle because more than one point of complexity registers as “too risky” instead of “real person, real circumstances”. The result is that creditworthy applicants are turned away, not because they can’t afford the mortgage, but because the process hasn’t evolved as the profile of the modern worker has. It’s time we all caught up.

Looking ahead at the next few years, it seems unlikely this trend toward more complex income will change. So, there’s a challenge afoot for brokers and lenders alike. How can we change our workflows and indeed our lending criteria to treat these applicants as they are: typical, creditworthy, even our ideal clients?

For brokers, confidence dealing with complex income is a new core competency. But in mastering this skill, they do something very powerful: they unlock homeownership for people who deserve access. 

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