We speak to a lot of people who have obtained a copy of their credit report from Equifax or Experian and tell us their score is Excellent/Very good or even at the opposite end of the scale and it is poor and therefore many people ask us what is the minimum Credit Score for a Mortgage, that they should have.
I have a little phrase “Ignore the score”, the score the credit agencies provide you is worthless.
Whilst attaining a high credit score for a mortgage may seem like a foolproof plan, in reality the credit scores are, at best just a broad indication of credit worthiness and not a guarantee.
Bear in mind that credit scores are just that, a scoring system that the credit agency uses, not a Mortgage lender.
A mortgage lender will use credit reference agencies but it will also score your application internally and to do this they will take the details from your credit report yes, and by details we mean balances, payment history etc and then combine it with the information from your application form to score you using their system.
We have seen people with a 999 credit score but yet have 2 defaults on their credit file.
What Credit Score do I need to get to get the best Mortgage?
The “best” mortgage deals can change on a daily basis. The cheapest lender today may not be tomorrow. Typically the lenders at the very top of the table with the Best Buys are the bigger high street lenders who do Credit Score your application but as mentioned above, these lenders will score your application using their own internal scoring system which collates information from your Credit Report and your Application form.
However there are some lenders who also pop up for short periods at the top of the best buys or even within touching distance of the top and these lenders do not credit score, these are Mortgage lenders who base their decision on whether to lend or not on Criteria and manual underwriting by a person a lot more than the banks who tend to use the credit scoring method more.
Summary
There are 2 types of lenders out there, those who credit score and those who credit check. Neither of them use the scores provided by Experian, Equifax or TransUnion, they use their own internal methods of reviewing your application, that could be scoring it could be a human making a judgement call, both have their pros and cons.
How we can help
At Mortgage Success we have access to well over 70 Mortgage lenders. These lenders range from Best Buys through to those who have had difficulties, we have high street lenders and smaller manual underwriting lenders.
We can help you to find the best mortgage deal for your circumstances whether you have a great score on your credit file or a poor score. Get in touch and lets have a chat and see what we can do.