This year at Mortgage Success has been very unusual one for us. Rather than a fairly consistent flow of business with peaks at the usual times, it has been very much up and down. With the World Cup earlier this year and England doing very well, we were quiet for those 7 weeks or so.
The same can be said for the snow we had in February (seems ages ago now doesn’t it!).
However, as a whole 2018 has been a very good year for Mortgage Success. We have submitted over £8.5m in Mortgages which is around £2.5m more than in 2017. In terms of Mortgages, we have written around 25% More mortgages than we did in 2017.
So despite the slow down around the time of the World Cup, it just shows how much things picked up between then and now for us to still end up significantly ahead of 2017.
Whilst the good year for our business is welcome I never forget that, given then majority of people we help have poor credit, or have adverse credit history, that the rise in business has meant that we have helped more and more customers.
Another good year has meant owe have helped customers buy homes who otherwise may not have been able to get a mortgage, we have helped people get out of uncompetitive mortgages and in each offer and completion we have helped the end result is a happy customer.
Mortgage Success stories
Example 1:
2018 saw some great stories on Mortgages we worked on. Below are brief overviews of 2 of my favourites.
We have a customer who came to us in 2014 after being put on a rate of 12% on a bridging loan to purchase his property.
He could not get anything else so this did the job. When we picked up the case in 2014, we managed to get him on to a rate of 9.9% which was still high but a significant saving on what he was paying. 18 months later, we managed to replace the 9.9% deal with a rate of around 5.5% which was a huge saving yet again and the customer could afford to go on to a repayment mortgage and start to make a dent in to the balance.
At the back end of 2017, the customer came back to us to review his deal. He completed on his new Mortgage early this year at a rate of just over 2% with a high street lender.
I thought this was a great example of someone who was in a difficult position when he first came to us but over the years we have seen him go from double digit interest rates through to high street bank rates.
Example 2:
Another example case we had was a customer who had been through a difficult few years with one thing or another. Because of those difficulties the customers had incurred a number of defaults, a CCJ and were in a Debt Management Plan (DMP). They had been told by another broker they could not be helped.
This application turned out to be a lot more challenging than we initially thought, however with some perseverance from our advisor and the customer we managed to see this one through to the end where the customers are now in their new home.
Changes to our systems
With the recent implementation of GDPR (were sure you remember receiving all of those emails from every company you have ever dealt with). We invested in a new system to ensure we were compliant with the new rules and to also offer extra security for your information. This took many months of work with an IT company, but we eventually managed to get this sorted and hopefully it makes dealing with us easier as well as more secure.
More reviews
In 2018, we started to concentrate on getting reviews as it seems to be a important factor with potential new customers. We now have reviews in 3 places – Google, Facebook & TrustPilot. Most of our more recent reviews are on TrustPilot.
The end of 2018
So 2018 is almost over, we expect to be finished more or less by the end of this week until the new year.
If you have not been in touch with us yet, we hope to hear from you in the new year. If you are already a customer of Mortgage Success, I would just like to say thank you for all of your support this year.