Last month we received an enquiry from someone I originally spoke to in 2018! It was quite nice that they remembered us. I still remembered a lot about the person despite the fact we never went ahead with an application.
The person had lost my number and was looking through the internet to find us. But in the meantime they had started the process to apply for a mortgage with a lender directly.
We had a catch up
We had a catch up on what had happened, as you can imagine a lot has happened in that time! The customer then mentioned the application they had started with a bank directly.
From the brief catch up conversation we had we knew quite quickly the lender they had gone to would not accept their application. I found the relevant part of the criteria quite quickly on the lenders website. I did not want it to look like we were being negative to try and win the case so thought it best to get it from the horses mouth directly so to speak.
It was a little surprising the lender did not pick up on it on their initial call. The person they spoke to may not be there to filter out applications they cant help with I suppose, but they could have saved both parties a bit of time had they been able to do that. We suggested they get everything together and we can check for any other problems and they can proceed with us or they can discuss their case with the lender directly as they had the full application phone call booked in. Thankfully we picked up on the issue before any hard credit checks were carried out although you would like to think the mortgage lender would have done that also when it came to making the full application.
Ease and reassurance
The customer felt at ease with us. He specifically wanted to come back to us but only went to the lender after struggling to find us after so long. I think also the reassurance that his choice of lender was wrong and that we knew it within a few minutes helped to settle the nerves. He was under a little pressure to get the offer as soon as possible due to knowing the vendor personally. He did not want any embarrassment or delays from his side.
It probably also helped that we were able to submit the case within 48 hours of having the conversation and within 2 hours of getting all of the paperwork from the client. And also that we remembered a lot about him from 5 years prior.
The application went in and within 3 working days we had a mortgage offer. There was a slightly cheaper lender, but they would have likely had the same issue as the original bank the applicant went to. So despite the issues we were able to save him money and time just by knowing the market.
Summary
In all honesty we did not do anything special here. We did not work any magic, we did not call in any favours or have to go to some obscure quirky lender to get the application agreed. As far as our success stories go this is quite a tame one.
The application itself was not exactly straight forward but it was also not overly complicated. 3 of the 5 “big 5” mortgage lenders would have probably got the application through. The key thing here was that we knew which 3.
In addition to that we were also able to:
- secure the applicant a cheaper deal than they were applying for themselves.
- We managed to get the application in quicker than the mortgage lender could do directly.
- Most importantly the mortgage was offered.
Although this was an easy case for us compared to some, I still think we did well but most importantly the customer is over the moon.