I know a lot of people go online to research their own situation in order to try and find a lender especially if they have already been turned down by a bank or broker previously. I know this as we speak to a lot of people in that position.
This seems more so when it comes to bad credit. I have found as part of that process you may end up reading reviews on these lenders. Sometimes I read these reviews myself and I think sometimes they are talking about a different lender. I am not looking to make accusations but I do wonder how many of these are down to the lender and how many are down to the broker or applicant.
That lead me to think it would be good to write our findings on these lenders. I have gone through our applications for the last 2 years with a few of the specialist lenders and documented our success rate and also where applications were declined – why they were declined. You can also read about some of our Mortgage Success stories here. Although in order to protect the identities of customers we do not name lenders in the posts.
Pepper Money success rate
Pepper money, what do we say about these guys… I have had a love/hate relationship with them over the years. There was a period they were so bad, we helped a customer make a complaint!
However, they then brought in a couple of good people to help put them straight in 2017/18ish. Since then they have generally gone from strength to strength and taken far more steps forward than they have back.
Going back to June 2021 (which is when they updated their system), we have had a 100% success rate in applications to completions with them. I find that if we give them an explanation of the situation they rarely come back to ask for more paperwork. They have also been one of the leading lenders with service levels and for a lot of the time over the last 2 years have been keeping to a 24 hour turn around time.
Bluestone Mortgages success rate
Looking at the reviews, they seem to be very well thought of. There are a couple of bad reviews in the last 12 months and generally those are down to service levels.
I like Bluestone, I have just gone back to 2017 and I can not see that they have declined any of our applications in all that time. Its nice to look back and see 100% record.
I think the odd bad review is probably fair to Bluestone, they are very good 99% of the time. Occasionally they are slow, but that is probably more down to the type of applications they receive. They are never going to do a straight forward case. I think it is to be expected it might take a little longer. They are also home to our best account manager who literally pulls out all of the stops to make us look good if there are any problems.
The Mortgage Lender success rate
We do not use The Mortgage Lender (TML) massively (much to the dismay of my account manager who I used to work with). When we do use them they are not too bad. I wont lie, they do occasionally come back with requests I think are a bit unnecessary but nothing too cumbersome and I think if we used them a little more we could pre-empt these issues a little more.
Since June 2021 we have only had one application declined with them. This decline was down to the property rather than the applicants themselves. They were unhappy with the property due to something that only cropped up after the surveyor had gone out.
The negative reviews from TML seem to be mostly around additional bits being requested and time to turn around reviewing those documents. My personal view is that they are a lender who are more likely to ask for additional paperwork, but not excessively so. Their turnaround times have been up and down. They were quite slow around the time of covid. But since then they have worked to bring them down and to be back in line with the rest of the market.
Summary
Our experience with these lenders is generally positive. As you can see on some occasions we have 100% success so far. I think there are times where applications should never have been sent to these lenders and so the decline was inevitable.
If the broker decides to not admit the mistake for example this can reflect badly on the lender and so they then cop for it on the review sites. That is not to say all bad reviews are the brokers fault. I am sure there are times where the lender has been awful. But I think we need to take the reviews with a pinch of salt to a degree. Its important to remember there are 2 sides to every story.
Just to note that these are not all of the adverse lenders we deal with. Also having adverse does not necessarily mean you need an adverse lender. We have plenty of examples here where we have placed people with bad credit with non adverse lenders.