In March time we submitted an application to the lender. First time buyer, no credit issues, deposit in place – all as straightforward as you could get.
The Mortgage went straight to offer as expected and we reviewed it to check it was all correct and congratulated the customer on her Mortgage offer – so far so good and all as expected.
It then started to go wrong…
The solicitor received their copy of the Mortgage offer and after reviewing it, they noticed the Purchase price was down as the loan amount, they queried this and the lender and the lender then re-issued the mortgage offer – incorrect again and then the same again.
We were completely unaware of this and the customer was none the wiser as to what the problem was, other than there was a problem. Nobody explained anything to her other than in vague emails.
This had been going on for around 2 months when the customer called us up really upset and anxious as she did not understand the problem and nobody had picked up the phone to talk it through.
What did we do?
We picked up the phone to the solicitor to find out what the issue was. Once we knew what the issue was, we could then explain it to the customer and let her know we were on it and to hopefully reduce her stress levels.
The next thing we did was to speak to the lender to try and get it all back on track. Within a few days we had managed to get it resolved and a new offer issued all correct – or so we thought!
It turned out the same thing had happened again and the solicitor had again received an incorrect offer where as ours and the customers was correct.
Again, we got on to the lender and eventually we had managed to get it all corrected and a new Mortgage offer issued with all of the correct information.
Outcome
It all came good in the end and we managed to get there with the correct Mortgage offer. The reason for writing this post however was purely because of something the customer said… “Without you, I would have just pulled out and left it”.
This was a Mortgage application which on the face of it was straight forward and should have gone through without touching the sides. I think this helps to sum up where a broker can be useful even on the simplest of applications. We were not aware of the problem until a few weeks in, but as soon as we were aware we spoke to everyone we needed to in order to understand the problem and how to fix it.
We did not get it done first time, but we did get there in the end and I would like to think the customers stress levels came down once they knew we had picked it up and were dealing with it.
Summary
We are not here to say everyone should use a broker, we realise that some people do not need a broker or want one and thats fine. A lot of our job for first time buyers is just to hold their hand and be the calming person in the process.
Whilst we are more used to dealing with complex applications, we are also there for the simpler cases and as we have experience in the complex cases it hopefully gives confidence that you know, we know what we are doing when the wheels do start to come off.