Quick Mortgages Review: A Fee-Free Birmingham Broker Paid by the Lender

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Quick Mortgages is the trading name of Cherry Street Holdings Ltd, a mortgage and protection brokerage working out of Bank House at 8 Cherry Street, in the middle of Birmingham. Companies House shows the company incorporated on 21 March 2019 under number 11896670, and it holds its own authorisation from the Financial Conduct Authority under firm reference number 841262 rather than trading on a network's permission as an appointed representative. That distinction is worth a moment: the firm answers for its own advice, and the reference number a caller can check on the FCA register belongs to the business they are actually speaking to. Twelve people appear on the team page, from a mortgage and protection manager down to a morale officer named Mr Bojangles, and two lines reach the office — 0800 779 7907 and 0121 661 4676.

The headline the firm leads with is that advice costs nothing. "Fee-free mortgage advice — we're paid by the lender, never by you" is the wording on its home page, and of the fees it might have charged it says "There aren't any. Not for the search, not for the application, not for the protection review." For a buyer that is a real number: brokerage fees of a few hundred pounds are ordinary in this market, and every pound of one comes out of the same pot as the deposit. Quick Mortgages instead takes a procuration fee from the lender when a case completes, which means a customer who takes the advice, then decides against the mortgage, has spent nothing but time.

What the firm does not do is lend. It advises and then places the case, describing its access as a panel of 110+ lenders it is not tied to, and it sells life cover, critical illness cover and income protection alongside the mortgage itself. Roughly 87% of UK mortgage lending now goes through an intermediary rather than straight over a lender's counter, on the Intermediary Mortgage Lenders Association's December 2025 estimate, so a broker sitting between borrower and lender is the normal route into a mortgage rather than an unusual one.

Nothing to pay, and the reason it can work that way

A mortgage broker has two possible pay packets: a fee from the borrower, a procuration fee from the lender, or some blend of the two. Quick Mortgages has chosen the second, and says so plainly on the front page. For a first-time buyer counting every pound against a deposit, a broker who charges nothing removes the awkward moment where advice has to be paid for before anyone knows whether a lender will say yes.

The rulebook that governs how this is told to customers is MCOB 4.4A. Under MCOB 4.4A.8R the information a firm gives about the basis of its remuneration must cover any fees it will charge, and under MCOB 4.4A.8R(1)(c) it must also cover whether the firm will receive commission from the lender or another third party and whether that commission will be offset against any fee. MCOB 4.4A.1R separately requires the firm to say whether there are limitations in the range of products it looks at, and MCOB 4.4A.4R expects a firm that is not searching an unlimited range to name the lenders it uses or state how many are available.

Half of that is now on the website. Since the firm relaunched its site on 10 September 2026 it publishes a lender count — "A panel of 110+ lenders, from the high street to specialists you cannot approach directly" — which is the "how many are available" limb of MCOB 4.4A.4R. The remuneration wording required by MCOB 4.4A.8R still arrives at the first appointment rather than on the site, so a reader deciding between three brokers on a Sunday evening cannot compare it before making contact. That is the practical cost of a firm that publishes a complaints procedure and a privacy notice but no terms of business.

The Own New route, and what a builder's incentive really buys

The most concrete thing on the Quick Mortgages site is its Own New page, because Own New is a scheme with published mechanics rather than a slogan. Housebuilders hold incentive budgets, historically spent on a stamp duty contribution or a kitchen upgrade. Own New redirects that budget into the mortgage itself, so the lender can write a much lower rate for the opening fixed period; Own New's own description is that Rate Reducer "uses a 5% builder incentive to reduce the mortgage interest rate as much as possible".

Virgin Money, a founding lender, published the arithmetic when the product launched on 26 February 2024. On a £300,000 new-build home its standard introductory rate of 4.79% at 65% loan-to-value with a £995 fee became 0.99% at 60% loan-to-value with a £495 fee under Rate Reducer. The reduced rate runs for the initial two or five year fix. The second product, Deposit Drop, takes the same builder money and applies it to the deposit instead, letting a buyer proceed on 5% rather than the 10% or more a new-build purchase often demands. Quick Mortgages says the two cannot be combined on the same purchase, and that the borrower takes an ordinary mortgage from the lender in their own name — this is not shared ownership and the buyer holds 100% of the property.

Two things follow that the marketing tends to skip. The reduction lasts only as long as the initial fix, after which the loan reverts to whatever the lender's rate is at that point on the full balance. And the incentive has been spent on the interest rate rather than on the price, so the buyer still pays the developer's full list price and the property is valued on that basis. Own New requires regulated broker advice to access, which is one reason a firm like this one is on the panel at all.

The lending market these cases are being placed into

Bank Rate stood at 3.75% after the Monetary Policy Committee held it again at the meeting ending 16 September 2026, announced the following day, by a majority of 6–3 with three members voting to increase it by 0.25 percentage points to 4%. CPI inflation had risen to 3.1% in August. The next decision is due on 5 November 2026, and a fixed rate arranged before it is priced on expectations rather than the outcome.

The Bank of England's Mortgage Lenders and Administrators statistics for 2026 Q1, published on 9 June 2026, show a market that is quieter in completions and busier in pipeline. Gross mortgage advances fell 12.3% on the quarter to £69.6 billion and were 10.2% down on a year earlier, while new commitments — lending agreed but not yet drawn — rose 11.5% on the quarter to £78.0 billion and stood 14.2% above the same point last year. Lending above 90% loan-to-value was 8.0% of the total, up 1.4 percentage points year on year. Lending at high loan-to-income ratios made up 45.1% of advances. Buy-to-let took an 8.9% share. Balances in arrears fell 1.7% on the quarter to £20.1 billion, holding at 1.1% of outstanding mortgage balances.

Looking forward, IMLA's December 2025 forecast puts gross lending at £320 billion in 2026, an 11% rise, and £350 billion in 2027. Remortgaging is expected to account for £103 billion in 2026, while internal product transfers — the switch a borrower makes by staying put with their existing lender — are forecast at £260 billion. That gap is the argument for taking advice at renewal: far more money moves by inertia than by comparison, and a product transfer is the one route where nobody is obliged to check whether a better deal exists elsewhere.

Three rule changes that have made an adviser more useful than a year ago

The FCA has spent the past year loosening mortgage rules that had been fixed since the 2014 review, and the changes are the sort a borrower will not hear about from a lender's website.

PS25/11, published in October 2025, did three things. It let a lender apply a modified affordability assessment where a remortgage to a new lender is more affordable than staying with the current one — which had previously trapped borrowers who could plainly afford a cheaper deal. It allowed a mortgage term to be shortened without a full affordability reassessment, cutting the lifetime interest bill for anyone whose circumstances have improved. And it let firms talk to customers without every conversation automatically becoming regulated advice.

CP26/12, issued on 1 April 2026 and closed to responses on 1 July 2026, addresses the loan-to-income flow limit: the rule capping lending at or above 4.5 times income to 15% of new mortgage lending across the market. The Financial Policy Committee's recommendation is that individual lenders be allowed to run above that share provided the aggregate flow stays at 15%, which in practice means some lenders will stretch further than others and a borrower near the line may be accepted by one and declined by another. Set that against the 45.1% high loan-to-income share in the Bank's own Q1 data and the value of knowing which lender is currently running loose is obvious.

CP26/18, published on 9 June 2026 and closed on 28 July 2026, proposes changes across interest-only and part-and-part lending, retirement interest-only mortgages, variable and irregular income, foreign currency loans, credit-impaired borrowers and bridging loans, with a policy statement expected in the second half of 2026. The roadmap behind all of it is FS25/6. None of this is settled, and a borrower with a straightforward salary and a 20% deposit will not notice any of it. A self-employed applicant with two uneven years of accounts might notice all of it.

Police mortgages, the self-employed, and the cases a branch declines

The service list runs wider than a two-adviser firm's usually does: first-time buyers, purchases, remortgages, rate switches, buy-to-let, specialist lending, commercial mortgages, bridging finance, Own New, Forces Help to Buy, and a dedicated police mortgages line. Under specialist lending the firm names the situations it will take on — self-employed applicants, freelancers, applicants with a poor credit history, older borrowers, and anyone a high-street lender would treat as high risk.

What is not published is any criterion. There is no minimum deposit, no statement of how recent a default or a county court judgment can be, no indication of the maximum age at the end of term, and no named specialist lender. For the reader whose whole question is "will anyone lend to me", the answer on the website is that they should ring and ask.

One caveat the firm does print, and prints in the right place, is that some of this lending sits outside the FCA perimeter altogether. Its own wording is that certain buy-to-let, bridging and commercial loans "may not be regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority". On an unregulated loan the MCOB advice rules do not apply and the Financial Ombudsman Service will not normally look at a complaint about it — the borrower is a business customer in the eyes of the rulebook, whatever the property looks like from the street.

What the website leaves for the phone call

The gaps in what Quick Mortgages publishes are all of one kind: the firm tells you what it does and very little about the terms on which it does it.

There is no terms of business document, no initial disclosure document and no client agreement anywhere on the site. The footer offers a complaints page, a privacy notice and a cookie policy, and that is the whole documentary record. Everything MCOB 4.4A requires about remuneration and range therefore arrives after contact has been made.

The panel claim has firmed up. The old site joined two different claims together in the phrase "whole of market panel" — a panel is a defined list, whole of market is the absence of one — and gave neither a lender name nor a count. The relaunched site drops the phrase and gives the count: "A panel of 110+ lenders, from the high street to specialists you cannot approach directly", and "We are not tied to any lender, so the recommendation is not steered by whose products we are allowed to sell." What is still missing is a single lender name, so a borrower whose case needs one particular lender cannot check before making contact whether that lender is on the panel.

The complaints page is a decent one by small-brokerage standards — it names a person, Rhiannon Tandy, gives a direct email and phone number, and prints the Financial Ombudsman Service's address at Exchange Tower, London E14 9SR and its 0800 023 4567 line. What it omits are the timescales. DISP 1.6.2R gives a firm eight weeks from receiving a complaint to send a final response or explain why it cannot, and DISP 2.8.2R gives the consumer six months from that final response to take the matter to the Ombudsman, along with a longer stop of six years from the event or three years from becoming aware of it. A borrower reading only this page would know none of those deadlines.

The team page lists twelve people with job titles and photographs and no qualification against any name — and one of the twelve is Mr Bojangles, a ginger cat with the job title Morale Officer, so the number of people who can actually give regulated advice is smaller than the page suggests at a glance. The CeMAP claim that used to sit on the home page has gone with the relaunch; the site now says only "qualified advisers". The protection side has the same silence around money: the firm's mortgage advice is free, but life, critical illness and income protection pay commission from the insurer, and nothing published says what that is worth or whether it influences which insurer is recommended. The rate tools, finally, now filter live advertised products rather than returning a form response, but the firm labels its own output: the figures "come from Mortgage Quote Ltd and show what lenders are advertising today", they are "indicative, not a recommendation, and they are not a quote", and "a product can be withdrawn without notice". It is a starting point rather than a lender decision.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 11 October 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.