The Interview Not another consultant
At 6’8” tall, Rob Jupp stands literally head and shoulders above the mortgage industry but he’s been biding his time of late. Now, a month after the launch of Brightstar Financial, Sarah Davidson finds out why he’s holding his head high again
The mortgage market is full of things defined by what they are not. Particularly post credit crunch. We have not-bank lenders, lending to sub-par credit borrowers who are not sub-prime. And brokers left in the market are deliberately showing us they’re not the cowboys who got us into the mess we’re now climbing back out of. Rob Jupp, formerly managing director
of Savills Lending Solutions, has just launched another “not”. Brightstar Financial is “not” a lender but has access to funding “not” available elsewhere in the market – most notably from Tiuta, both a shareholder and investor. It is “not” a broker but it will place
and arrange specialist deals for clients (via the introducer) through its exclusive relationships with other distributors, including remaining shareholders and investors Mortgage Advice Bureau, the national broker and network, and London- based broker Coreco. And Brightstar is “not” a packager,
although it will deal with some of the administration involved in packaging the application.
So whaT IS IT? Brightstar is another of those things we have a lot of in the mortgage industry: a consultant. But it’s not your run-of-the-mill consultant. “That’s a good way of looking at it,” says Jupp, managing director of
32 mortgage iNtroducer MARCH 2011
Brightstar. His chosen field? Specialist lending. An interesting choice given the lack of appetite from at least 90% of the lending market for this type of business. “I don’t know about everything but what
I do know about is specialist lending,” he says. “I’ve spent a decade in it. I’ve been at the front when the wave was riding high and I’ve been at the bottom when the wave came crashing down. I get it. I understand the need for this sort of lending for the economy and the nation. I know that right now there isn’t enough out there. There’s just niche lending like bridging and second charge lending. “We are at pains to get across that
we’re not a broker nor a packager,” says Jupp. “We are not here to do outsourced administration for lenders, although we will do some part of the process for some of our panel lenders. Really, we’re looking to fill a niche for enquiries coming in that currently don’t have a home.” Those enquiries are what Jupp refers
to as specialist lending and as he sees it, they fall into four categories: bridging, secured loans and second charges, commercial buy-to-let and specialist first charge mortgages. “We do deals that brokers in the main
will get maybe one or two enquiries for in a year,” he explains. “We’ll do five or ten of those a day. We’ll know where to take them and what different lender appetites are for each business type.” While there are four areas Jupp plans
to concentrate on, it is the first three that he thinks will be kind to Brightstar in 2011 but he is particularly interested in the last category of borrower. “That final group is where we believe
the more medium term market growth will be,” says Jupp. “All
the indicators say
that specialist first charge will slowly come out of the mire over the next two years but won’t reach any sort of scale until 2013. We’ve kept it in our mix because we want
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