I was asked this question earlier last month but it is one of those questions that crops up quite often. I tend to say with the applications we take on the chances of being accepted are 99%. We can never give 100% guarantee as there are always things that can crop up and surprise us. One of the things we do to back up our confidence is to only charge our broker fee on full offer of a Mortgage.
I have recently gone through our last 3 years worth of applications to see how accurate (or not) that figure is though and below goes into a little more detail.
Declined Applications
Inevitably we do get declined applications. Here are some examples of those applications which do get declined.
I think the very important thing to mention is that a declined application does not mean you can not get a mortgage. It means the lender we applied to does not want to offer you a mortgage. We have access to over 80 lenders. That means if one lender does decline your mortgage application we do usually have alternative options.
What about with Bad Credit?
As you may have guessed from the content on our website, we specialise in adverse credit mortgages. We speak to people who have found us looking for a broker who can help with bad credit or people have been declined elsewhere before coming to speak to us.
Having bad credit does not necessarily affect your chances of getting a mortgage. It may affect your options and potentially the deals available but we still have a very good success rate.
What are the chances of getting a mortgage with bad credit?
After looking over our figures, we average around 2-3 declined applications per year. Of those we managed to place the vast majority with a second lender and have a mortgage offered.
These are probably not the most accurate figures but are a pretty good indication. We average an offer on 95% of the applications we make first time. We also manage to get the bulk of those declined applications through on a second attempt with an alternative lender. I think where we take on your application, there is a good 98-99% chance that you will end up with a mortgage by the end of it.
What about with a clear credit history?
I would say that we are probably on a similar sort of rate. We do not really get many declined applications and I still think it is around a 98-99% success rate even if you have a clear history. I can only think of one application declined in 2020 where the customer had a clear credit history.
The customer had taken out a lot of Pay day loans and so there was concern from the underwriter that there had not been a big enough gap. It was all within criteria, it was just down to the underwriters discretion. Funnily enough we actually managed to place the application with the same lender around 6 weeks later when the customers had found a property.
Summary
Unfortunately we will never have a 100% success rate. There will always be times something unexpected crops up. That could be with your circumstances or the property or it could just be “underwriters discretion”. However with a 98-99% success rate, I think that is pretty good and should give you confidence that if we do take on your application, the chances of your mortgage application being accepted is very good regardless of your history.
We tend to take the approach that we should only be getting paid if you get your mortgage, you came to us for a mortgage so we should only be taking it on if we think we can help. The last thing we want to do is waste your time or ours, so you can be confident if we take on an application your chances are very good.