Karen joined the business seven months ago, starting as head of national accounts and later being promoted to head of sales at the end of 2023.

Despite Karen’s upward trajectory, she joined the lender at a time of market uncertainty.

“I think the word that everybody has used to sum up 2023 was, ‘volatile’. If you look at where the market was, rates were fluctuating. In the words of Yazoo, ‘the only way was up’,” said Karen.

Consequently, when Karen joined the MFS team, her main message was then — and still is now — stability, something the market may be beginning to familiarise itself with again.

 “The horizon for 2024 is looking a hell of a lot more optimistic,” she stated.

For Karen, the past political year hasn’t helped to mellow the waves in the housing sector: “We’ve had nothing but housing minister after housing minister, and that’s a shame because the housing market is so important to the UK — it needs a level of stability.”

“Personally, I’d love to see the housing minister separate . . . and not have any political allegiance. I think you should look at the country as a whole, rather than go red or blue.”

Despite the multiple changing of the guard, as well as precarious (though now steadied) interest rates, MFS made efforts to bring its own element of solidity to its clients through freezing interest rates for four months from June to October last year, while also trialling new semi-commercial and BTL products.

Last year, the lender made upward progress as it surpassed £1.4bn in lending, while onboarding a colossal £1bn of institutional funding.

Now, the finance provider has set a target of £2bn of lending across its bridging and BTL departments by the end of 2024.

To reach this goal, Karen hasn’t waited for the financial dust to settle before putting the wheels of change in motion, not least within her own sales team, which she has sought to bolster with a recruitment drive.

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“I spent a lot of time looking at and working with the team and going, ‘Right, what am I missing? How can I grow this business to the next level?’, I have brought everyone in because they've got a skill set that I didn't already have within the team.”

At the time of this interview, Karen was still in the process of filling the last couple of vacancies and closing in on the ideal candidate: “I'm down to my final two. I'm getting very excited.”

As the numbers within MFS continue to grow, with a 33% growth in team members over the past year, and the sales team now having over 20 personnel, Karen has also been tasked with spreading the name of the company throughout the market, and one way of doing this has been through joining mortgage clubs and panels including Optimum, PMS and Dynamo.

“[This] just brings a different dynamic… we get to spread the word of MFS and what we can do a little bit wider and a little bit further, which is important.”

Despite the gains Karen has made, she still recognises a central problem within the market:. “Valuations is always a hot topic,” she commented.

“We've had some down valuations. Are people currently over inflating their prices? [Is it] estate agents? Who knows? I wouldn't want to say where the fault lies.

“But there are still, when you look at what's coming out in the Halifax House Price Index, a lot of areas which have seen massive growth across the UK. There are also some that are not so quick, but still growing.

“Is London and the South East suffering? It’s not as bad as people are making out, so I think it’s important that we value the property in the right way.” 
While valuations may be an issue in Karen’s eyes, the lender is not following in the footsteps of some of its competitors when it comes to aspects such as AVMs and desktop valuations, preferring to maintain traditional practices.

“We still do long-form valuations, and I think that will be here to stay. That's important for the client, the broker, and obviously us as a lender. It gives us that security.

“I don't see anything else in the valuation space changing. I know some of our competitors have moved over to AVMs, and I think they have a place. But, for some of the stuff we're doing — more complex cases — I don't think it's where it should be.”

However, MFS still has an ace up its sleeve when it comes valuations.

“The benefit we've got is we have an internal valuation team that we can to refer to if we need to.

“So, when we do have a valuation challenge, we have a third party internally that we can go to and ask, ‘Is this out of step with the market or not?’ They're qualified to give us a real answer.”

While Karen may be keen to establish stability both in practice and image for MFS, she continues to make the changes which she sees will progress the business.

And with this, Karen is keen to establish that looking for stability in the market should not mean standing still on the defensive.

“We're optimistic and we need to be buoyant; we need to be quite brash about the market, and we need to be bold.”