This can mean different things to different people. From our perspective it does not mean the rate and fees will be tailored to your situation. There are lenders who can do that, but typically those are for very well off people with very large mortgages. At that point banks are more inclined to negotiate. For the rest of us mere mortals lenders typically put out there offering and we can choose to go with it or not. For the purposes of this post, when I discuss tailored mortgage advice I am talking about advice we provide.
As we tend to deal with the more complicated applications here, we and our customers have to be open to the fact that we may need to use different lenders to people who are employed with no bad credit and are much more straight forward.
An example of tailored advice
The reason for this post is that we have come across something that we have never come across before… An applicant who has up to 6 jobs per year! Thats right, 6 different employers for varying times – it might be a month, it might be 6 months.
I sat there and all I could think was “no chance”. However, as it is something new I thought I would give it a try. My thought process was that whilst this persons employment is unusual and inconsistent he also has over 5 years doing the same thing and barring 2020 due to covid his overall annual income is quite consistent and in excess of what we need.
My first call was to one of the more flexible high street lenders – straight no (as expected).
The next step was to then look at the building societies. I put together an email with an overview of the situation and a bit of a breakdown of their pay. I then fired that out to 15 or so little quirky lenders who take a manual approach to underwriting.
By the end of the day we had 12 “Not for us” emails and 3 potentials.
Potential Success
The lenders came back and asked for more information. With that, we started to get a breakdown of employment history – start dates, end dates, income during those periods. We also needed to get some documents from HMRC to confirm earned annual income over each of the last few years.
Whilst the applicant in no way fit criteria with these lenders. We were looking at getting across that although his income is different. There is a consistency when averaging it over the year which in reality is no different to someone who is self employed and/or seasonal workers. If you look at gardeners or actors for example, both of which we have helped obtain mortgages, gardeners earn most of their income during the summer months and actors tend to have good income whilst filming but then there may be breaks between jobs.
Our customer in this case also has quite a specialist job – hence so many different companies prepared to employ him. Lastly the industry he works in is always in demand and at the moment is in a period of growth.
This to me is where tailored advice comes in. We are unable to get standard documents that we need – ie 3 months payslips from the same job in a permanent position. But instead of saying we are unable to help, we are getting the information together, trying to push the plus points and explain the negatives and get an underwriter onboard.
Outcome
This application is on hold at the moment whilst everything is put together. We are unsure of the outcome at the moment. But I thought it was a good example of where we can provide tailored advice. We can try to find the little lenders who can take a view on something that is outside of criteria. They will work with us to try to find a way to do the mortgage
Within 24 hours, we had 3 potential options. Considering my initial thought was “no chance” that is definitely a positive. Hopefully within the next few days/weeks once we place the application we will have a good success story to post about…