Why apply for mortgage before the searches and survey - EA is pushing...

smcqis

great, thanks for that. When all the contracts are sorted or being sorted is the solicitor doing his searches or do they do this after contract?

We have a completion date given to us, will this never change and be the day we get property (if anything goes to plan)?

kford224

smcqis wrote: »

great, thanks for that. When all the contracts are sorted or being sorted is the solicitor doing his searches or do they do this after contract?

We have a completion date given to us, will this never change and be the day we get property (if anything goes to plan)?

It depends - on the initial form we ticked a box that gave the solicitor 'permission' to start the searches straight away, before anything else. They may start straight away or they might hang on until something else has happened.

I don't think the completion date changes, although we are waiting for ours at the moment. Apparently the solicitor is waiting for answers to a few queries before setting the date

DVardysShadow

Fly_Baby wrote: »

Hello. We had an offer accepted on a house but being FTBs we really want to be sure that everything is absolutely OK with it because we don't have any experience of owning the property and potential problems.

Now we have to arrange the survey and searches. I cannot be sure that it comes out fine, with the house being old and the vendors not willing to budge on the price further in case some problems come up. So I wanted to have the survey done first and then apply for the mortgage, in case I need to pull out because I would then lose the mortgage application fee, waste a credit check, etc.

But the EA is pushing me to do it all at the same time. Are they right?

Wrong order, as the others have explained.

You need to know that the Mortgage application is best done as a 2 stage process

• AIP - Acceptance In Principle, which means that the lender has assessed you as good for the money, the credit reference check is done, but you don't have a house in view
• Full Acceptance, where the survey is done.

Get to AIP before putting in an offer - the fees only get charged later when the lender has to have their survey done.

Fly_Baby

We have the AIP so we know that we will be able to get the mortgage - in fact we saw several lenders and have not been turned down by anyone of them.

sonastin

There is no easy way to avoid wasting fees in house buying. Sometimes it is the mortgage application that causes the problem and you can't get the funds to buy. Sometimes the solicitor's searches highlight problems that make you want to pull out. If you have an inkling of where the problem might lie, there might be some merit in focussing on the riskier area first so that you don't waste money on the other one. But then again, even if you think one part of the transaction may be problematical, the other part might surprise you.

The best advice I can give is get the solicitor and and the mortgage application going simultaneously. You don't know where the hold-up might come so just get everything going as quickly as you can.

System

Fly_Baby wrote: »

We have the AIP so we know that we will be able to get the mortgage - in fact we saw several lenders and have not been turned down by anyone of them.

It may sound silly to you as you have been treated well by all lenders but you should never assume that an AIP becomes a mortgage offer.

It doesn't matter how many lenders give you an AIP, when you make an offer on a property and proceed beyond this initial stage then you must have an initial confirmed mortage offer.

There is only one item in the whole process of buying a property that you need and that is a firm mortgage offer. You can lose properties, fall out with sellers, have a solicitor or surveyor advise you that the property isn't worth it and recover from all of this. But what you never recover from is doing everything else but not having a firm mortgage offer.

Until you have a mortgage in place, you should assume that any other money you have spent on the property in question is money down the drain.