I thought this would make a great little example of what we can do. On the face of it it does not differ from a lot of our success stories. However it is the little details which I think make this a very good success story.
The background
We had a couple of First time buyers who wanted to buy their first home together. The couple had Defaults over a 2-3 year period with the most recent being less than 12 months ago. There were background difficulties such as ADHD, covid, loss of job etc which we also had to contend with.
They had a good deposit (30%) and the highest earning applicant had been in their job a while on a good income.
What we did
A lot of people think our job is to do the research and place the application. For a lot of people that could be the situation. But in this case (and a lot of what we do), sometimes the details can make the difference and in this case by being a bit nosey and poking around we were able to save the customers a small fortune.
The clients came to us having done some of their own research. One of their first comments was that they knew we would end up with a lender like Bluestone. They were happy with that as they wanted to get onto the property ladder after a horrible couple of years.
It would have been easy to look at the credit report and say we agree. According to our research tools there were no alternatives. It seemed they had done a pretty good job of the research based on published criteria.
After speaking to the clients and understanding the reason for the adverse, we thought it would be useful to speak to a little lender who can take a human approach to underwriting. We put together a timeline of what happened, how the adverse came about and an explanation of underlying issues which had now been picked up on and hopefully resolved.
We then discussed this with an account manager and head of underwriting. Then we received a response from the head of underwriting – REJECTED
We are not called Mortgage Rejection, rejection is not what we do! We do Success! The first thing we did was to pick up the phone, talk it through and put together some additional points which we think were overlooked.
A couple of days later and the head of underwriting seemed to agree with us. We were able to proceed to a full application.
Outcome
Once the head of underwriting allowed us to proceed we submitted the customers full application. It was underwritten and accepted quite quickly (within a week or so). They ended up with a mortgage at 3.5%. Compared to the rates they were happy with from Bluestone at around 6.5% there is obviously a huge difference.
Summary
I do not like this section as it sounds like we are blowing our own trumpet. However I think it is important to show where an experienced broker can come into their own.