By Ruby Hinchliffe

Home buying service Stipendum has launched a remortgage service which comes with a guarantee that homeowners can remortgage unlimited times with no broker fees.

The service, which does come with a £99 one off cost, is called ‘Remerge’ and includes what it is calling an “inbuilt financial health and wealth check”.

Advisers linked through the service via Mortgage Advice Bureau have access to 12,000 mortgage products across 90 lenders.

The launch came just a couple of days after mutual building society the Nottingham announced its creation of a digital transfer service, which does charge a broker fee.

Stipendum claimed it was the “first” remortgage service to guarantee no broker fee.

The firm’s chief executive, Christina Melling, said when one considers more than 500,000 UK homeowners remortgaged in the last year, with a typical broker fee of £300 each time, it was a £3.7bn problem “well worth solving”.

She added: “Broker fees are a large proportion of a homeowners mortgage and remortgage costs as another layer in the huge overall cost of securing property funding.

“And on an ongoing basis, given the typical propensity to remortgage multiple times in our lifetime, we perhaps forget how much this element really costs us and Stipendium have set out to solve this for the consumer.”

According to the Bank of England, 501,501 remortgages carried out in the UK over the past 12 months. 

Stipendum suggested the typical homeowner remortgages four times during a 25-year mortgage term at an average total cost over that period of £9,960, with the broker fee totalling an average of £300 per transaction and equalling a lifetime cost of £1,200.

The firm’s solution, which is cheaper by charging a one-off fee, could still include things like exit fees, which is another charge separate from the broker fee.

Stipendium was co-founded by Melling, former propositions head at north west IFA Cheetham Jackson, alongside John Bohan, a Marks & Spencer’s ex-sales head who went on to set up gift card provider Jigsaw.

It has already launched an ‘all-in-one’ home buying service, which can be redeemed via a gift card, organises everything from finding a house, setting up a mortgage appointment, through to the conveyancing, electric, and a takeaway on the first day of move in.

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