This success story is one I am quite proud of. It is not our normal bad credit type of mortgage. It is something that was quite different to anything we had come across before. I actually thought it would be straight forward and the fee we charged the client reflected that… It turned out to be a lot more complicated!
The situation
We originally spoke to the customer when doing their Mortgage Capacity letter for their divorce last year. The divorce took a little while to go through but it eventually did and the customer came back to us to help get them a mortgage.
As part of the divorce hearing there was a requirement to sell the matrimonial home but that may take a while to go through as the other party is a little reluctant to sell. However our customer has a letter from the court in essence saying they are no longer liable for the mortgage.
I thought it would be quite simple to find a lender who would be prepared to ignore the mortgage as they had a letter from the courts confirming our customer is no longer liable for it…
The reality however was a little different. The Mortgage lenders I spoke to (and there were a lot of them!) all said that there is a contract between the lender and the customer and the letter from the courts would not supersede that – What is the point of the letter then?!
What we did
As I thought it would be easy, I plugged the figures into our sourcing system and filtered it for the products we wanted (ie a 5 year fixed rate).
I then called the cheapest lender just to double check and they informed me it would be a problem… Still expecting it to not be a problem we went to the next lender and the same outcome! At that point I started to realise it might be a little trickier than expected.
Eventually we worked through the options and we found a lender who would be open to it.
However, due to one of the applicants being a little older and going above the lenders maximum retirement age that then brought another issue! We worked with our account manager to alter the numbers and make some slight tweaks to how the case was presented and we were able to get everything to fit criteria.
I had to discuss this with the applicant as it meant reducing the term by a year. Everyone happy and we submitted the application.
The outcome
The offer came through in 48 hours but there was a problem, there was a requirement that the mortgage be cleared! Slightly annoyed as this is not what we discussed I called my account manager and after some back and forth the underwriter was standing by their decision!
We then had to look for another lender and we were getting no after no from every lender until we eventually managed to find a lender but with a higher interest rate. The customers had a choice to make as to whether to proceed or carry on renting. They mulled it over and came back to me to confirm they wanted to proceed.
It took a little longer this time due to the nature of the lender we had to go to and how they assess applications. This brought another issue, the estate agents! However we kept the agents in the loop from day one thankfully. They were happy to wait a little longer as we were in constant contact and able to offer the reassurance that we would get there. After 2-3 weeks we had a mortgage offer through.
We had another #MortgageSuccess to add to the list.