The (sh)abbey - are they trying to avoid lending?

jill2002

Emma,

Probably one of the brokers are better to answer this. In branch it would be max 72 hours, but I understand it will be longer through a broker.

Leon_W

Dont worry emma.

Abbey get a slating on this board. Yes they can be slow. Yes they are shambolic at times, but would I use them ? Absolutely. In all the years I've been an independent I honestly can't think of one case where they said they would do something and then not. Others may disagree but I still have "the Abbey habit" ( you have to of an age to get that one) and their present range of mortgages with free valuation and £250 cashback are right up there with the best rates available.

Regards

emmahane

its so hard not to worry when youre so close but feel so far, our broker said another 2 weeks but i wonder why when weve given them everything and theyve done valuation, until i get that offer in my hand i wont stop worrying lol

emmahane

sorry to be a pain but can i clarify, have abbey approved our mortgage but just wanted evidence to what we had originally given them?

Leon_W

Yes.

As long as what you've told them can be backed up that's fine.

What you have to understand is that any mortgage application contains LOTS of information. To check every single detail would entail a marathon operation that might get you a mortgage agreed by 2015 !

In the real world, all of that cannot be be checked to the nth degree so lenders HAVE to take a view based on credit score, history etc otherwise nobody would ever buy a house.

My guess is that your case has been randomly pulled to prove to the FSA that Abbey are up to scratch.

Regards

emmahane

thank you leon, youve helped a lot, hopefully not too much longer then

Hippychick

We have just had our mortgage offer issued by the abbey, all in all it took them 15 days from our initial application to issuing the full offer - so we're really pleased with them

They did all the underwriting first before the valuation with us as well.

Conrad

Abbey are a mickey mouse lender and will go down hill now Santander are at the helm. The fact some people by chance have a good experience does not alter the fact that on average the service is very poor.

Santander I do not trust either. Spain has something like 20% unemployment with the whole building industry on stand still and mass repossessions. That is bound to have an impact on Santander shortly. Spains largest developer - 'Fadesa' recently went bust.

Jill you say you have never had a case 'pulled' after the valuation is done. Well that is merely chance. As you will be aware the FSA rules on responsible lending implicitly require ALL lenders to pull a goodly percentage of cases at random for audit purposes. They cannot sign off on thier annual FSA submissions without doing this and Abbeys PI providers require this process too.

sarah77

mirandabakes wrote: »

Without going into loooooong details, we have been trying to complete our mortgage with the Abbey for several weeks now. It was originally "fast-tracked" and approved subject to valuation, but has been dragging on, and on, and on with new little pieces of information being required all the time (they must have called us 4 times to get our credit card number for the valuation). Do they really intend to lend us the money or do they just lead people on to meet some kind of quota and then miraculously change their minds?

Hi,
We went through this process with Abbey in January. Applied through a broker and it took 12 weeks to get our mortgage offer but finally came through in the end. There was quite a backlog of work back then and Abbey kept asking for more and more documents. Very stressful time but now i have my lovely house. Hope things speed up for you

sarah77

emmahane wrote: »

not in our case we werent even told theyd done the valuation until i asked our broker to aske them when they were doing it and they said it had been done the day before, it was all oked, then they said they wanted a letter from our accountant with 3 yrs figures on there even though wed given them 3 years accounts, they also found something on our credit file which we had to provide evidence on, again, so our mortgage definately hasnt been approved yet even before the valuation

Hi,
We sent accounts 3 times in Jan/Feb, not exactly sure why we had to keep sending them. Also had to give a break down of OH and his business partners income. I think Abbey were just being very thorough for us. I think for us it was 1(ish) week from valuation to morgage offer.

Sarah