the interview


A typical high street lender


Keith Street, head of Kensington, has his eyes on more than just the Premiership this season. Kensington has a realistic view of the market, its own ability and appetite to lend and the channels it wants to lend through. But can the lender secure a champions league place just like Street’s beloved Spurs?


by


Sarah Davidson, deputy editor, Mortgage Introducer


Keith Street, head of specialist lender Kensington, is a realist. He has to be. He supports Tottenham.


He tells me this with a glint in his eye though because Tottenham is a team that has remained profitable despite the financial dramas going on in the rest of the Premiership and wider footballing world. Club after club has hit the headlines for falling into debt to the tune of millions, even billions, with the Premier League’s debts now totalling a whopping £3.4 billion. Yet despite all odds Tottenham, led by Harry Redknapp who joined the club in 2008, has so far seen its way through the financial maelstrom and for the first time ever qualified for the Champions League at the end of last season.


The mortgage market has seen much worse, with debts mounting that have made everyone’s eyes water, but despite numerous non-bank lenders falling by the wayside over the past three years, Kensington has hung on in there. After being acquired by the South African-based specialist banking group


Investec in August 2007 Kensington was able to weather the worst financial storm in living memory, enabling it to tentatively return to lending in November 2009 and with rather much more gusto in March this year. Street was, like Redknapp, appointed in 2008, but as head of Kensington following his predecessor Alison Hutchinson’s departure. And it’s Street’s realism in relation to football that he takes to heart when he talks about lending.


“When we suspended our lending in 2007 we always intended to come back when we felt the time was right and circumstances were acceptable,” he says. The re-entry to the market was a toe in the water last November however, which Street says was part of the lender’s strategy. “We decided in October last year that we would look for a re-entry in November but keep it low-key for two reasons. One, we’d been developing the new system and didn’t want to go all out to start off with. “Two, we wanted to test our ability to


attract new business given that we’d been out of the market for 18 months by then. We wanted to make sure we still had good relationships with the intermediary market.” Street needn’t have worried as brokers


have been scrambling to submit business. Just four months into the relaunch and Kensington had developed new products, drawn on more funding from its parent’s balance sheet and went for further growth and a bigger push in March this year. “We’ve been gradually building our


product lines on the residential side and also with the buy-to-let proposition. We’ve also been gradually increasing our distribution. At the start we had a very tight distribution reflecting our desire to control volumes but we want to continue to build our volume in a controlled manner, so we’ve expanded the distribution out.” Kensington currently has 10 partners on its panel but Street says he wants to widen that distribution adding that “in terms of the volume of lending we’re doing, we’re tracking exactly where we planned and want to be”.


Broker opportunities The new-look Kensington has a realistic view of the market, its own ability and appetite to lend and the channels it wants to lend through, but Street says there are opportunities for more brokers to work with the lender. “When we were planning our return to the market, we set criteria for our distribution partners, the most important of which was that they had the ability to


mortgAge introducer AUGUST 2010 25


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