Earlier this year we received a call from a gentleman who was calling us after more or less giving up any hope of getting a Mortgage.
Prior to calling us, he had been dealing with a Mortgage Broker the Estate Agents had put him in touch with. The Mortgage Broker had looked at his case and done 3-4 Decision in Principles and 2 applications, one of which cost the customer £150 only for it to be declined.
By this stage the customer was getting stressed and debating giving up, the vendor was getting a little concerned, the agents were applying pressure and the purchase was very close to falling through.
What was the problem?
In this case there were 2 issues – The Debt Management Plans (DMPs) and a broker with not enough experience in the Bad Credit sector. The previous broker was applying to Mortgage lenders who accepted Debt Management Plans… On the face of it that sounds like the right thing to do right? The problem here is that whilst there are maybe a handful of lenders who advertise that they will accept a Debt Management plan, they tend to limit it to one DMP per application.
In this case, each applicant had their own DMP and so it was falling out of criteria. The bigger issue is that the same broker made the same mistake 2-3 times – so not only were they making mistakes, they were making the same mistakes multiple times.
The Brokers inexperience in this field was becoming clear as the only lenders they were trying were the ones who are quite well known in the adverse market. As soon as they had run through those handful of Mortgage lenders, they appeared to be running out of ideas and in our opinion were in effect slinging mud, hoping some of it would stick.
How did we help?
This part of the post always feels like we are blowing our own trumpet but the reality is that we deal with type of application on a regular basis and know the market well. We know the lenders who do not have huge marketing budgets that will sit and talk the case through with you. This is where we can discuss the pros and cons of the case in detail and talk about the customers in order to see if we can get the lender on side.
The first thing we did was to call some of these lenders, within 24 hours of having everything we needed from the customer, we had found a lender who in principle were prepared to accept the case. We called the Estate Agents to let them know we had taken over the case and explained this is our speciality and that under the circumstances we would keep in regular contact in order to calm the situation with the vendor.
Over the coming days we were back and forth with the lender and eventually had satisfied their requirements to the point of being able to submit a full Mortgage application. The Mortgage went to full offer which was great news. The whole process did take around 4 weeks, which is longer than it would take with a “normal” Mortgage lender, but the main thing is that we got there.
It is hard to explain how proud we are of this case. Everyone involved had more or less given up, pressure was being applied from the vendors and the agents and we were able to showcase what an experienced broker in Bad Credit Mortgages can do when compared to someone who does not specialise in this part of the market.
If you find yourself in a similar situation, please do get in touch. We can not promise the same outcome, but we specialise in Bad Credit Mortgages. We do not do anything special, but we do know who to try and how to package your case in order to give it the best chance of being accepted. Many other brokers do whatever hits their desk, there is nothing wrong with this, but because we know our part of the market better than most, it means we know of options that other brokers may not.