Welcome to Acre!
What is Acre?
Acre is building the UK’s best all-in-one mortgage & protection platform.
The mission? Make home buying quicker and easier for buyers, brokers, insurers, and lenders by bringing everything into one place.
How are you different to other platforms?
When giving mortgage and protection advice, brokers find themselves rekeying data again and again. It’s a battle switching systems at each step - collecting data from the customer, searching for mortgage products, navigating the complexity of affordability rules from the lenders, and each with their own criteria for lending. The end of the process is no better, you bring the proof of research and other documentation back together and distil the results into a “reasons why” letter... by hand.
Acre holds the entire advice journey in one system, giving you the power to complete every part of the process in one place. When third-party data or services are needed, Acre pulls these right into the platform. This means the case never gets out of sync with reality. And we streamline every bit - from lead and introducer management to fact finding, sourcing all the way to insuring and conveying the home. Even compliance is done automatically along the way, so at the end, we automatically create all the documents needed, and make sure they always match the case.
The other reason you should be excited about us is because of the way we build everything we do around data.
We collect data from over 45 sources, to pre-populate fact finds and inform sourcing. The way we use data speeds up applications – we pull credit reports from Equifax, expenditure estimates from ONS, and detailed address history and KYC data. We use this to prequalify the customer and to populate sourcing to get the right mortgage, every time.
We also pull detailed property data into a profile, so your customer knows what hiccups might await them when it’s getting home insurance or conveying the property. What’s more, our sourcing takes into account lender criteria, real-time affordability decisions and multiple product types, including second charge, retirement interest only, porting, product transfers and further advances. Pretty good right?
How was Acre born?
Rewinding to 2017, our founder, Justus, was buying a dreamy property in France (oh là là). It turned out getting a mortgage in a country where he doesn’t live was harder than he originally thought it’d be. After trying and failing with banks he was already using, and with several local banks, he realised it was time for an online brokerage.
The process was moving, but it was at a snail’s pace, and he had no way of knowing where he was in the process. In fact, it moved so slowly 3 months passed so all his documents had to be resubmitted. The DIP took 4 months, the conveyancing another three – and the fees doubled by the time he was done, without warning. By the time he owned the property, over 6 months had passed. Justus felt the pain buying a house can bring, and he knew something had to change.
So Justus and his team at Founders Factory took a long hard look at the process behind getting a mortgage. Why was it so poor? Why was the technology so outdated? After spending most of a year with brokers, lenders, clubs, and insurers it was clear a new way of thinking about mortgages was needed. Why had no one mapped out the process to improve it? And that’s how Acre was born.
How can I try it?
If you’re a broker or principal, you can give Acre a try today by booking a demo. A member of our team will get in touch to show you how Acre can improve your team’s efficiency and improve your bottom line.