Mortgage firms are asking staff to work from home, restricting travel and putting a stop to face-to-face meetings as coronavirus worries mount.

Yorkshire Building Society says it is asking colleagues to avoid travel between different office sites and branches.

It has told staff to only attend essential external meetings and to avoid gatherings of 25 people or more altogether.

It is splitting teams that are critical to the business between sites.

Keystone Property Finance has cancelled face-to-face meetings between its business development managers and brokers as a precaution against the spread of coronavirus.

The buy-to-let lender says BDMs will not be attending large events and will keep in touch with advisers via telephone and video call meetings.

Vida Homeloans is also bringing into force a work-from-home policy for all staff from Monday.

It says its IT and telephone systems will enable all key account managers, underwriters and support staff to work remotely.

All BDMs and account managers are cancelling face-to-face meetings and will not be attending roadshows or other events for the foreseeable future.

Brightstar, meanwhile, says it has been on “lockdown” since Monday.

This means it has banned all visitors to its three offices.

The master broker has also pulled out of all events for the foreseeable future and has tested a remote working strategy for its staff members.

All staff have had their temperature taken to check for signs of the virus and the offices have been sterilised in a deep clean.

Online Mortgage Adviser creative director David Bird says the firm has implemented a work-from-home policy as of today (Friday 13 March).

He says: “Last week, we held planning meetings for coronavirus, to ensure that we were prepared in case we went to work-from-home mode.

 “We decided to implement a work-from-home policy as of Friday 13th March, especially in the interest of protecting those coming in on public transportation and considering that we thought it was going to be inevitable.”

 “From a data security and control perspective, we’re all using centrally administered and controlled G Suite (Google) with two-tier authentication. “We use two-tier for our CRM system, as well.”

Bird says that staff are using Google Hangouts, Slack, email and telephone to keep in touch with one another and a company-wide virtual meeting will take place on Monday mornings.

 He adds: “We have a large amount of management information and statistics reporting, which helps us to keep our fingers on the pulse of what’s going on.

“If much smaller groups need to meet up in person, that’s fine at the moment. 

“They can come into the office, as the risk is much lower if there’s a very small group of people meeting.”