Britannia mortgage application grind

danielanthony

Hello,

I just want to share my experience and frustration at the Britannia mortgage application process.

1. Phoned Brit to apply for mortgage, very nice lady took our details, said yes to AiP and arranged for someone to call us 3 days later to go through full application. Great!

2. Man from a branch called, was annoyed with me that we had not yet received all the paperwork after our initial phonecall(!) mortgage illustration etc. Emailled it through, went through full mortgage app.

3. Got the full mortgage application through for us to sign, bore no relation to the answers we gave over the phone e.g. First time buyers box marked 'no', when we said we were, no mention of credit cards etc.

4. Brit had to write to our employers for references, neither employer received these letters, had to resort to faxes, this has taken three weeks.

5. Received amended mortgage application forms to sign, still not completely correct, have amended again and expect them to be sent back for resigning. This is week 4.

6. Brit have asked my employer to confirm that I have no shares in the company, I work for a multi $Bn IT organisation, how is this relevant? Further delays for confirmation of my employer reference.

Throughout all this, each request for info has been sent via 2nd class post, this takes anywhere from 2 to 7 days to reach its intended target, us or our employers. We always send back via special delivery. Both of us work in steady jobs with the deposit in the bank and should be as straight forward as it gets, so from their initial promise of sorting out the application within 21 days we are on day 30 still with a few things to still to be reviewed before the offer can be sent out.

Very frustrating, is this typical for Britannia?

Framps

I'm in the process with them at the moment, just crawling over the finishing line to get the formal offer sent out!! Funnily enough I'm on about day 30 too...

Overall though, I've found them to be very good - I found the 2nd class post thing quite frustrating but in the last couple of weeks I discovered that dealing with them frequently on the phone is a doddle and gets around the issue of waiting days for 2nd class post to dribble through. Unlike many organisations their call centre staff are actually equipped with a system that allows them to provide useful information and updates to people calling them.

I even managed to head off another data request that was trickling through by post and actually managed to get it to them before I received their postal request!! Ridiculous!

That said, things have slowed down in the last week as they have all the data but are inundated so have not been able to review the final piece of info. I've been reliably informed that it should be within the next 24 hours...

danielanthony

I've been told today that although they got the other docs they asked for it will be reviewed in the next 72 hours

Will give them a bell tomorrow to see if any progress has been made, think the only issue could be proving the build up of deposit over the last 6 years as my OH only has kept her ISA statements for the last six months.

There could be fun times ahead...