Advantage Mortgage Shock Offer

shino74

Well I am in a state of shock....currently we have a mortgage with Advantage (Only deal we could get 2 years ago). Yesterday we received a letter telling us that if we move our mortgage away from them they will waive any fees plus give us a £21,700 cash allowance to be taken direct off our outstanding amount!!
Cant believe that they will take off 25% off our outstanding loan just to move away from them....woohoo. Rang them and they told me they are attempting to reduce the amount of mortgages on their books.
I for one am not complaining.

mr_mortgage

Congrats ... as long as you can find another lender!

Good luck!

shino74

Well our credit ratings are good and have not defaulted on anything for years! Surely someone will offer us a mortgage now we are looking at 60% LTV?
They are also offering a broker free of charge to us. Would be mad not to take it!

Robert_Sterling

How much is the outstanding balance?
What are the terms of your mortgage?

AlecE

Are they offering to take £21,700 off the mortgage and then allow you to take it away (i.e. reduce the value of the mortgage you need to take out) or are they offering you an advance of £21,700 to pay off a chunk of the mortgage once it has been moved (and so potentially incurring fines in the form of an early repayment charge on the new mortgage)?

Alec

shino74

The outstanding balance is £88442 of which will be reduced to £66742 if I can move my mortgage. Value of my house is approx 100 - 100K.
Yes they are offering to reduce my amount to move mortgage with NO early repayment charges or fees!!!!

:beer:

Robert_Sterling

An unbelievable offer.

AlecE

shino74 wrote: »

Yes they are offering to reduce my amount to move mortgage with NO early repayment charges or fees!!!!

I was not querying if they were waiving the ERC, I was querying whether you would get hit by ERCs from whoever you move to. As long as they are saying you need to find a new mortgage for £66,742 (i.e. they are discounting your existing mortgage prior to the move) rather than one for £88,442 and then they give you the £21,700 to use to make an overpayment then you should be OK from the ERC point of view on the new mortgage.

Now all you need to do is find a suitable provider for a (roughly) 40% LTV mortgage - fingers crossed that shouldn't be too difficult.

Alec

c0c0nuts

Hi there!
We were in a similar situation, with Mortgage Express, albeit no cash offer which is a shame!
We were originally with Kensington ( when we were self-employed) who sold our mtg to Mortgage Express which is part of Bradford and Bingley, these have since been nationalised and are also reducing their mortgage book.
They've lifted all ercs to get rid of people, we've moved to Natwest and are saving £120 per month, they've just dropped their rates again but we're just happy to be back with a High St lender.
Best of luck to you!!

Gorgeous_George

I can only assume that there is an undisclosed problem with the original mortgage. This offer makes no sense financially or from a business point of view. Maybe the mortgage is unenforcable and the OP would be best advised to seek expert advice.

I'd love Britannia to make me an offer for my tracker.

I'm sure the press would be interested - assuming the OP has understood the offer correctly.

GG

theartfullodger

Yup, G George must be right: There must be some really dodgy problem with your loan such as they can't force you to make payments,...

I'd be very inclined to take professional advice (pay for it) from a mortgage broker or solicitor (S preferred) to review the documents you originally had from Advantage and see if there are any holes in it to your advantage (sorry about the pun).

There's no other plausible explanation as to why they would want to be so inexplicably generous... The alternative (staying with them and you exploiting the problem) must be even more expensive for them.

Do tell us when you find out!!

Advantage - (assuming you are reading this thread). Do us all a favour and post the reason & also who - if anyone - got sacked/had his bonus withheld for making the mistake...

Cheers all!!

Lodger