Owner describes how she set up on her own within weeks of qualifying
Having worked for twenty years in mortgages, Rachel Lummis (pictured) is proof positive of the success you can achieve by building your career from scratch, under your own steam - though she believes it would be hard to do the same thing today. Lummis became a broker in 2005, soon after gaining her CeMAP qualification, and set up her business, Xpress Mortgages in the following year. Specialising in residential and buy-to-let lending, she has established a loyal customer base.
“When I opened my business, I'd only been a broker for six weeks,” Lummis said. “I hadn't got a clue what I was doing. I had one young girl who was a first-time buyer - that was my first ever case. I did the mortgage for her first maisonette, then I did the mortgage for her house in Staines, and I've recently organised the mortgage for her house in in Ottershaw. She's married now, has two kids and is on her third house. I had a lot of help from the Halifax, because I had two cases going through with them, and the people on the phone were brilliant. They talked me through it, and I went on to get more cases.
“I remember sitting there on the first day. It was just me and my auntie Susan, who was going to do a bit of admin part time for me. I just thought, ‘Oh, I wish the phone would ring’. The phone hasn't stopped ringing since, and sometimes I wish the phone would stop ringing, it rings all of the time! We used to have a fax machine. You would handwrite application forms and fax them over, and then we used a packager for a buy-to-let or anything a bit quirky. You'd phone a courier to come to pick it up and take it straight to the packagers.” Lummis added: “There was a tone to the fax machine - a little musical tone - and you would think, ‘Brilliant, that could be an offer.’ That's how we used to get our offers, they'd come in on the fax. It was very different.”
In the days before social media, promoting her Surrey-based business was achieved through a local print publication and a physical presence through a town centre premises. Lummis maintains her office today, but she doesn’t believe she would do the same if she was starting out now – nor work for herself so quickly.
“We get people popping in, and having a shop has definitely paid for itself, but now it's all online, isn't it, you don't need to be in these shops,” she said. “I think now there's no way, no way in this world, that someone who's only passed CeMAP, and been an adviser for six weeks, could do it on their own. The products, the clients’ needs and the regulatory paperwork have become so much more complex. It’s all grown and grown. I don't think that I would recommend to anyone to start off on their own. They need to be with other brokers, to learn. I think you've got to get, at the very minimum, two years’ whole of market experience working with other brokers before you can even think about going off on your own. I think I got lucky.”
The mortgage career Lummis enjoys is a far cry from her original ambition of being an air stewardess– a goal she achieved, but which she found didn’t fit in her with her life, when she became a young mother. “It all seemed very glamorous,” she recalled, “We used to go to European cities like Paris, Amsterdam, Zurich, but it was harder work than it looked.”
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A smaller business can be satisfying
Lummis is content with how things worked out and that she has kept her brokerage small, with two brokers and two administrators. “We're a great team of four and it's brilliant,” she said. “I could take on another one or two brokers, but then if you take on any more than that, that's a different business and suddenly you're not a broker anymore, you're running a business, dealing with staff and all of those issues. I never wanted that.”
The market continues to be challenging, with some chinks of light, Lummis acknowledges. “For years, there always seems to be something that comes and knocks us,” she said. “So, we had the credit crunch, Brexit, we got over COVID and then we've had the cost-of-living crisis. But, you know, lenders are coming up with all sorts of things for first-time buyers. There are so many schemes and I think that's great. I can't believe that buy-to-let is surviving as well as it is, with all the taxation and rule changes. I'm still busy and a lot of my professional landlord clients are still wanting to buy more. The market is changing, with more complex properties, and HMO is more profitable, but there'll always be something that keeps us up on our toes.”
Despite the challenges, Lummis wouldn't do anything else. “In actual fact, the other week the Euro Millions prize was £120mn or something crazy,” she said. “I said to the girls in the office, ‘We’d better all do the Euro Millions tonight - would you still come in if you won?’ They actually said, hand on heart, that they would, that they'd stay here, even if they might reduce their hours a bit. And I'm the same - I would still come back to work. I would lower my hours because I work like a crazy woman, but I wouldn't give it up, even if I was a multi, multi-millionaire.”
