First Direct Mortgage Application - How long did it take?

anselld

New FD customer. £250k offset remortgage. Started a couple of days before Christmas, completed 31 Jan. Happy day!
Great service, very helpful via phone and email. Highly recommended. Plus £100 paid to switch!!

Agreement to survey less than a week.

Survey to funds available about 10 days. (You need to sign various paperwork in between.)

eslick

FD customer and ours took a couple of months and missed the day we needed to remortgage by a day but this was due to our old bank. Any way really happy got one of those magic 0.79 trackers and saving a fortune so happy happy happy

Anon

It can take up to 12 weeks or so according to their initial information - I had a mixed experience - you would think straight forward, with remortgage, LTV less than 50%, Loan to Salary x2, agreed immediately. The early part of the process was quick - days for paperwork to come through, a few days more for the mortgage to sign ... then silence ... two more weeks before the valuation came through to them (only aware of this because we phoned - nothing received in writing), paperwork waiting to be checked by them, despite them checking it line by line over the telephone when we applied (only aware of this because we phoned), another two weeks delay waiting for a redemption figure from our existing provider (only aware of this because we phoned) - it seems that action is only taken when you phone up and they then get on with the next stage (or rather, perhaps this is the normal speed and it would be completed in the 12 weeks - but you can get it done faster by phoning?!).

I appreciate that they say it can take up to 12 weeks but when it is a straightforward remortgage, you would think it could be done much quicker (or maybe I was just impatient to get off the high rate that we were paying and recoup some/all of the redemption penalty before the rates go up again!). That said, they are always at the end of a phone when you ring, hardly ever have to wait to be put through to someone and deliver what they say they will within the 12 weeks - probably been inundated with applications.

Still kicking myself for not looking in this sooner when rates started to fall at the back end of last year as their offset tracker was even better value then and we would have more than recouped the redemption penalty by now . Ah well, who could have predicted it .

Anon