Keep brokers close to the lender

There’s something uniquely personal about self build. It starts not with a property, but with an idea of how someone wants to live. Turning that idea into a home is rarely straightforward. Build costs can move, timelines change and decisions made on paper eventually meet the reality of a construction site. For lenders, that means understanding self build as a journey, not simply a mortgage transaction. 

At Scottish Building Society, we’ve spent years learning from self builders and brokers in the communities we know well. Now, as a national lender, we’re taking that experience into more communities across the UK. 

And one thing we’ve learned is that specialist lending doesn’t have to mean adding complexity. 

Self build is a specialism, but that doesn’t mean a broker should have to go through a third party to access the lender. We see real value in a direct relationship between broker and lender throughout a self build case. The broker speaks to us, we get to understand the customer and the project, and when questions arise or circumstances change, there isn’t another layer sitting between the broker and the lender. 

That matters because self build cases evolve. When they do, good lending requires the people who understand the project to be able to talk to each other. It’s a simple principle: specialist expertise, without unnecessary distance between broker and lender. 

Lenders should also be thinking about what happens when the building work is complete. Self build borrowing can carry a higher rate during construction, reflecting the different risks and complexities involved. Once the customer reaches the point where they can move to an appropriate residential mortgage, the focus should be on helping them get there as soon as their circumstances and the property allow. 

The aim shouldn’t be to keep somebody a self build borrower for any longer than necessary. The aim is to help them become a homeowner. Technology undoubtedly has a role in making mortgages simpler, but self build demonstrates why human judgement, communication and experience still matter. As a smaller building society, we’re not trying to remove the specialist nature of self build. We want to remove unnecessary complexity around it. 

That means taking what we have learned over many years, giving brokers direct access to the lender, understanding each project on its merits and bringing that approach to more borrowers across the UK. 

Because behind every self build application is something remarkably straightforward: someone trying to build a home.