Towards the back end of 2025 we were asked to look into a mortgage by a potential client.
This mortgage was generally straight forward until you slip in the IVA. The applicant had a good stable address history, his job he had been in a while, affordability was not too bad – there was a credit card with a reasonably small amount on (less than 10% of annual income). Even his credit report, was relatively clean! 2 years worth of green markers and about 10-2 months of arrears prior to that and 3 years worth of green markers prior to that. It was clear to see there had been issue within that 12 month period.
But then came the curve ball, the IVA. Because the IVA had been discharged for less than 3 years, that really did limit our options.
Can you get a Mortgage with 2 years discharged?
Due to the IVA being discharged for less than 3 years our options were always going to be a little limited. Before I started the research, I thought we would be looking at 70% LTV with rates of around 6% up to 6.5%.
That was what I advised the customer I thought would be available on the initial call. I said I would look into it though as I could be wrong and rates had generally been on a downward trend.
After carrying out our research (you can get an idea of what goes into research on this page), we were able to find the client a couple of options. These options were better than I had expected.
The big one was that we were able to go up to 75% LTV which was helpful as this was quite important to the client. The other big one was the rates! We had 3 options, all of them under 6% and the lowest being around 5.6%.
The application
We ran the application by the lender just to ensure we had covered everything off – the big thing here is that although the IVA is within criteria, we needed to check about the defaults and whether they would also need to fit the lenders criteria despite being part of the IVA.
There were also a couple of other little niggly bits but nothing major and everything else was fine.
We proceeded with the application and added some notes to explain the IVA, the adverse etc and although the application was less than straight forward (which I have fed back to the lender), it did go through and we received our mortgage offer.
Summary
I think this is why it is important to get someone experienced in adverse if you do have adverse. Yes, we got it wrong on the initial call, but we also did not sit there thinking we knew it all.
Things change all the time in our world and we always research applications from scratch. But more importantly, we know where to go. Because we specialise in what we do we have lots of meetings with lenders who work in this part of the market. More so than most brokers I imagine.