Mortgage fund gets the nod from ASSIRT
Howard Funds Management’s flagship product, the Howard Mortgage Product, has been awarded ASSIRT’s highest rating.
Howard Funds Management’s flagship product, the Howard Mortgage Product, has been awarded ASSIRT’s highest rating.
The Challenger International subsidiary gained an A rating for the fund which translates to a five star rating under ASSIRT’s new star rating system to be intro-duced next week.
ASSIRT senior research manager Patrick Bennett says the fund offered good re-turns at low risk.
He says there is a strong and experienced team in place looking after the trust and the group had come across innovative means for building revenue.
However, Bennett says the mortgage fund category is difficult to rate due to the lack of consistent benchmarks. This is mainly due to the wide variety of property which the funds provide mortgages for.
Bennett also says the managed mortgage funds had avoided many of the problems associated with solicitor mortgage funds in the past few years due to their strict credit controls and property valuation expertise.
ASSIRT had originally set out to rate all of the Challenger products, however, there is still a lot of restructuring at Challenger in the wake of its recent raft of ac-quisitions. Bennett says ASSIRt hopes to rate the full suite of Challenger products shortly.
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