First-time buyer and mortgage broker advice

CoconutRings

Hello everyone!

My partner and I are planning to buy a property in East London as first-time buyers and would really appreciate some advice. We are looking for a flat around £200.000 - £230.000 with a deposit of £50.000. We have received some advice from friends and family assuring us that this is a realistic scenario, but please let us know if you think it may not be. We are both employed full-time and in secure jobs (I have also been promoted recently - do mortgage lenders take such information in consideration?).

We are now planning to contact a mortgage broker in order to get a decision in principle. We have done some research and it would be great if we could find a whole-of-market, free service. We discovered we can contact this broker: themortgagebroker.co.uk for advice but they do not mention a fee on their website nor do we know if they are any good. If anyone has any information on them in particular please let us know or if you've had any good experiences with any other brokers, again, please let us know. We are aware that we may be asking for too much in regards to receiving a free service so we are open to looking at mortgage brokers that do charge a fee if they come highly recommended.

I will leave it at that, thank you for reading and if you need any other information please just reply here.

Many thanks!!!

LukieD

Funny...I'm in exactly the same situation as you and was looking at the same site today. Thought I'd come here and see if anyone had used them and this was the first thread I opened!

I have also heard MortgageOptions mentioned so they might be worth checking them out too.

Hopefully someone can make some recommendations as their sites and all fairly generic so it is difficult to actually judge them in advance!

Thrugelmir

Why not just ring them and find out if they charge a fee?

ruggedtoast

I can recommend London and Country, they are a large fee free, whole of market broker. I have found their brokers to be very pleasant and helpful, with no hard sell whatsoever.

They found me a mortgage that (just) beat the price comparison websites with a bank I didnt even know did mortgages.

None of the big call centre mortgage brokers we spoke to wanted to do an Mortgage in Principal for some reason. They all said to wait til we got an offer accepted and then apply properly.