This is an interesting one! We have a long standing customer we have looked after for around 7 years now. Her situation has never been the most straight forward but also not overly complicated. It was more a case that she had about 90% of the market available to her. That means nothing overly complex, but we need to pay a little more attention to the details.
This application
This mortgage application as mentioned above, not overly complicated but very tight on affordability. We managed to work with the client to ensure everything fit criteria and passed affordability.
The application went in at the end of 2023 and was subsequantly offered not long after – all good!
However, due to some problems with a property in the chain everything dragged out much longer than expected. We needed to obtain a mortgage extension. Not a problem as nothing had changed… or so we thought!
The situation
A problem came to light when trying to get the mortgage extended. The applicant was receiving child maintenance from an ex partner. However he had not paid this month! When the underwriters requested a bank statement to evidence the maintenance we were unable to provide what they needed! This meant the application was on paper no longer passing affordability and we would see a drop in the loan amount by around £8,000! That in turn meant the mortgage was now no longer enough for what was needed.
EVERYONE (me and the client) started to get a little stressed at this point. We never told the rest of the chain at this point as we had potential options, plead with the underwriter, try a different lender etc.
What we did
We wrote a letter to the underwriter explaining that the customer was a long standing customer of theirs and ours. They could see payments from the ex partner 4 years ago, back in October-December on the statements provided previously and also on the March bank statement we provided with the extension request.
We explained that there was a problem with the ex partner and that he had some money troubles that month due to taking time off work with illness and it was just a one off.
The underwriters surprisingly accepted this and then re-offered the mortgage with the extension!
Summary
I have to be honest here in that I was not overly confident the letter would work. I was also not sure whether the underwriters would revoke the mortgage completely, reduce the mortgage down and completely ignore the maintenenace, only use some of the maintenance (and we could hope it could get us close to what we wanted) or just carry on as is.
It was one of the few times I have been quite stressed with an application as I was not confident we would get the outcome we wanted. Thankfully we had a lenient lender, a nice underwriter and the client had an incredibly talented mortgage broker haha.
Everything come together in the end, but all of that hassle as we needed the mortgage extending by 10 days!