I know I am biased and I know it post may sound like we are being big headed with the whole suggesting we are good brokers but bear with me here.
History of this customer
We had an enquiry earlier in the year. I told the customer we would probably need a 15% deposit, the customer said that would not be doable and 5% was the maximum. This was due to the level of adverse. It wasnt anything significantly bad but it was one of those it was never going to pass on the high street and we did not have any other lenders we knew of who would go up to 95% due to a combination of the age and recency.
We were not completely sure if a 15% deposit would be needed and as every day is a school day we started our research. Mortgage Brokers have access to a sourcing system, its not 100% reliable but in this case it was 100% useless! We put the details in and it came up with 1 lender! It was a high street lender and we knew full well it would fail the credit scoring so was not even worth trying to obtain a DIP.
That meant we had to go full Old school Mortgage broker and make calls to lenders and see if we could talk the case through – it was one of those where the credit report did not look great, but with some context it make much more sense.
The outcome
After making some calls and going through old files for thoughts, we managed to find a lender.
We found a product not on the sourcing systems!
- We overcame 10 Defaults! (These were all 3-4 years old)
- Multiple pay day loans in the last 12 months!
- A couple of arrears in the last 12 months!
- And at 95% LTV!
Every now and again we do something that even surprises us.
But what was the rate I hear you ask? Admittedly it was a little higher than high street, 1% above the high street so nothing too bad, we were not talking double digit rates or even close, 6.5% give or take.
Summary
This is where I think a good (or big headed) broker comes in to their own and sometimes using a specialist can make the difference. Sometimes we rely too much on the tools used to help us, we are no different and can be guilty of doing the same.
But because we specialise in this part of the market we know everything may not be as it seems on the sourcing system and because of the experience we have we can call on that to help your applications. This is not to blow our own trumpet, there are certain types of mortgages – Buy to lets for example, we would probably rely on the sourcing systems for complex issues. We are fine with simple straight forward BTLs but the more complex applications we would probably struggle with.
A broker is good, an experienced broker is better and if you have a complex situation a specialist is better still. We can be the difference between getting a mortgage and not. I do not think this customer would have ended up with a mortgage with many mortgage brokers personally.
If we cant blow our own trumpet when we have done a good job, when can we?
As I say in every post, get in touch. If we think we can help we will tell you, if we are unsure we will still look into it. But where we think its not possible, we will also be upfront with you on that.