Sykes went from being a broker at Private Finance to being associate director and senior broker, until he landed his current role as technical director and senior broker.
This means he handles all the lender relationships, press work, and he is a broker as well.
This is a more or less typical journey for new recruits at Personal Finance, who are often straight from university and fresh to the industry, and who are then trained up in-house for 18 months in an employed capacity.
"During that they work under a senior broker to sort of get to know the market, get a large exposure to different types of cases and things.
"And then we put them through their exams while they're going through that. And then we let them start broking through us. So we don't have many people that we recruit, like from existing broker firms."
Changing tactics
In quieter times such as these, the work brokers are required to do changes somewhat. Sykes says he does a lot of work with existing clients, making sure they are locked into the best deals early, with an option to change at later date if needs be.
He also does a lot of work helping people who cannot refinance right now but need to prepare.
"Work with your existing clients and put their minds at ease or set them up in terms of what they can do between now and, say, 2025 when they will need to refinance, to make sure they're in the best position possible then."
This is work done for free but it is work the clients need, he says.
In the current environment he finds borrowers are moving away from tracker mortgages and are mainly opting for two and even five-year fixes in search for certainty.
For anyone having to remortgage now, but who cannot afford the new rates, he advisers to either use cash savings or non-tax-efficient investments to pay down the mortgage, extend the mortgage term, or put some of the mortgage on interest-only, whichever is most suitable for the client's circumstances.
There has been a resurgence of interest-only mortgages, which has some people concerned, given the product's history.
But Sykes says the products have never disappeared to the extent people might think. Besides, these days lenders require evidence of credible repayment vehicles before agreeing to the deal, minimising the risk of creating mortgage prisoners somewhat.
Sykes says: "Obviously these solutions are sort of kicking the can down the road a little bit, because although rates will hopefully improve, they're not really projected to improve back to the 1 per cents or 2 per cents.
"It's not ideal, but the situation we're in isn't ideal with these rates. So sometimes non-ideal decisions have to be made to mitigate things in the short term."
