As somebody who avoids going into shops at every opportunity it was only natural that I reached for the laptop when we decided it was time to move to a new home. A mere 48 hours later an agent had visited our property, produced an advert which made us wonder why we were moving, leaving me to click a button (which I did on my phone whilst holidaying in the south of England) which put our house up for sale. Frictionless in every sense.

This new business model just ticked every one of my buyer motivations, or in this case perhaps I should say, seller motivations. I get to benefit from aquality24/7 online sales system (where 70 percent of their sales activity occurs outside of traditional office hours when agents are closed), a fixedpricesales fee which was one-third of a typical agent fee, and aspeedto market which was, quite frankly, scary.

With our house up for sale we turned attention to our budget. We headed straight to our current lenders website to see how much we could borrow but where I expected to find a lending calculator, I instead found a number for the contact centre.

So I called (but I had to wait until the next day when they were open again) where I was asked when I'd like to book an appointment for? Immediately. This of course was not an option, by which time my wife was already looking at houses I was certain we couldn't afford. Begrudgingly we joined the 4 day long queue to speak to a mortgage advisor and hoped those in front of us were more impatient.

With time to kill I picked up the laptop again and decided to visit an aggregator site to see what other mortgages were available. I knew we had a great deal from our current lender so I wasn't particularly optimistic; after all, most people's largest monthly expense is their mortgage and price is important to me. But I was wrong, very wrong.

To illustrate this, 45 seconds later I had completed a search* which returned 385 mortgage products from 32 different lenders. Impressive, but most of all was a price differential of only