The Intermediary – April 2025 - Flipbook - Page 30
Q&A
Cumberland Building Society
The Intermediary speaks with Grant Seaton,
head of intermediary lending at Cumberland
Building Society, about broker relationships
and the evolving holiday let market
It’s The Cumberland’s 175th
anniversary. How does a mutual
with that kind of heritage stay
relevant to today’s broker market?
When you’ve been around as long as we have,
heritage is naturally part of the story. But we’ve
never stood still. What has kept us going for 175
years is our ability to evolve while staying true to
the values that matter – supporting people and
the communities we serve.
That same thinking runs through everything
we do with brokers; we’re here to build lasting
relationships. Since launching our intermediary
division, we’ve grown the team, introduced new
tools and widened access to our product range,
but our approach has always stayed consistent.
We haven’t lost sight of what brokers need from
us, which is responsiveness, clarity and a common
sense approach.
We’ve grown into Cumbria’s largest financial
institution, with £3.2bn in assets, 762 colleagues
egion. Those numbers
and 31 branches across the region.
sound big, but wee still pick up the phone, know our
customers by name, and caree about every case.
What is The
he Cumberland’s
particular lending specialism?
Holiday lets are where we’ve reallyy built up
’ve been supporting
longstanding experience. We’ve
o decades,
brokers in this space for over two
tland and Wales,
lending across England, Scotland
’ve developed a
and over that time we’ve
strong feel for what makes a viable
holiday let proposition.
The holiday let market has
seen some tightening of criteria
or pausing of certain types of
new business recently. At The
30
The Intermediary | April 2025
Cumberland, we’re fully committed to supporting
the holiday let market for the long term, and last
month we reduced our core range fee to support
landlords looking to keep costs manageable.
With our Specialist Range we offer lending to
all entity types where they have portfolios of up
to 20 properties. We can arrange finance on up to
10 properties in that instance. We’re also happy
to consider first-time investors. When it comes to
limited company lending, we set ourselves apart
as we don’t require personal guarantees as part of
the transaction.
With the market tightening, how
are you helping brokers with more
complex cases?
Let’s be honest, most holiday lets are no longer
straightforward, if they ever were. But that’s
where we thrive and our approach really comes
into its own. We don’t follow a rigid formula. Every
case is manually underwritten, which gives us the
flexibility to really understand the story behind
each application rather than rrely on set criteria.
We recently funded a cconverted grain mill
near Eyemouth, Sco
Scotland. It had history,
character, and no shortag
shortage of quirks, not
many comparables, no holida
holiday let licence
in place and a tight timeline. Some
lenders said ‘too tricky’
tricky’, but we said ‘let’s
see what we can do’.
We worked with the br
broker, made
c
the license a release condition,
and kept
It’ that kind
everything else moving. It’s
of flexibility brokers really value,
especiall when their clients
especially
are trying to bring something
lif
special to life.
Cases lik
like that show the
importanc of staying close
importance
to the detail. When brokers
bring us something unusual,
