There is a lot to be said for knowing what you’re going to get. If you have used the same tradesman a few times and they turn up when they said they would, do a good job and charge roughly what you expected, you’ll probably ring them again. You’re not going to spend three evenings trawling the internet just for the excitement of trying somebody new.
Buy-to-let brokers are not all that different. If a landlord comes back to refinance or buy another property, the broker already knows which lenders did what they said they would do last time, and which ones made the whole thing harder than it needed to be.
Overall, buy-to-let lending is holding steady. UK Finance’s buy-to-let lending Q1 2026 figures show that 58,272 new buy-to-let loans worth £10.8 billion were advanced during the quarter, up 3.26% by number compared with a year earlier. Average gross rental yields also rose from 6.93% to 7.21% over the same period.
So, if landlords are going to keep buying and refinancing property, brokers are going to keep coming back to lenders they have used before. And when they do, knowing roughly what they are going to get becomes pretty valuable.
Specialist should not mean unpredictable
I often wonder whether we make specialist lending sound more mysterious than it needs to be. Yes, there will be cases where somebody needs to sit down and properly understand what is going on, but that shouldn’t mean a broker sends an application in and waits to discover what the lender thinks its own criteria mean that particular week.
Being clear about what you can’t do is just as useful as explaining what you can. Brokers don’t expect every lender to accept every landlord, and I suspect they would be slightly worried about one that claimed it could.
What they need is a reasonable idea of where the boundaries are before they start. If you say you will consider first-time landlords, for example, the broker needs to understand what that means when an actual first-time landlord lands on somebody’s desk.
The same applies to limited company lending. A criteria page can tell you that SPVs are acceptable, but the useful bit for the broker is knowing which structures work and what information will be needed, so they can decide whether it is worth taking the case any further.
The second case should be easier
Buy-to-let is slightly unusual because there is a fair chance the borrower will be back. Somebody buys their first rental property and, if it works for them, there may well be another purchase further down the road.
That’s where consistency starts to become commercially useful. The broker already knows the client, and if they also understand how a lender approaches that type of business, they are not starting again with a blank sheet of paper.
At Darlington Intermediaries, that is a big part of what we mean by ‘Confidence in Every Case’. We want brokers to be confident that we will be predictable, reliable and consistent in the way we handle their cases and look after their clients, so they know what they can expect when they come back to us.
It doesn’t mean the answer to property number two automatically has to be the same as it was for property number one. The property might be different or the landlord’s finances may have changed, but the broker should at least recognise the process and have a decent idea of where the case is likely to sit.
For landlords with smaller portfolios, the broker can become the person who remembers how the last deal was put together and what worked. The landlord is unlikely to spend their week studying mortgage criteria, so when they come back with another property, there is real value in having somebody who already knows them and knows which lenders are worth approaching.
Good landlords still need somewhere to borrow
We are very supportive of buy-to-let at Darlington, and the reason is actually fairly simple. We believe good landlords provide good homes, and it would be wrong to work on the basis that everybody can necessarily buy a home or wants to.
Our buy-to-let proposition reflects the part of that market where we believe we can be useful. We can consider first-time landlords with no minimum income requirement, while our limited company range supports SPVs with up to three properties and is available up to 80% LTV.
But I don’t think the answer is simply to keep adding criteria until you can technically say you do everything. I would rather a broker understood exactly where we can help and came to us knowing there is a sensible chance of getting the case through.
That also means looking at the process when it is making life harder than it needs to be. We have spent time looking at how technology can take care of the fairly vanilla work, because I don’t need an experienced underwriter spending their time working out something a system can do accurately; I want them looking at the cases where their experience can actually change the answer.
That should mean the next case feels a little easier than the last one. When the landlord comes back with another property, the broker already knows how we work, what we are likely to ask for and whether it’s worth picking up the phone to us again.
