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leeclements

Afternoon all,

Long time lurker, first time poster - so bear with me!

The girlfriend and I are looking to get on the property ladder. We've been scrimping and saving for a year and hope to have our deposit together by August. The lease on the flat runs out in November so we're hoping to be in a new place by then. Idealistic I know.

My question is, how far can we get before we have our full deposit in place?

We know the location, our budget and what we can afford. What we don't know is the mortgage application process and how far we can progress until it's all together.

Any help/comments/tips/pointers would be greatly appreciated as I've just glanced at the calendar and it's panicked me somewhat!

Many thanks,

Lee

akrot1

I'd have thought all the way until exchange. I'm in the process of purchasing at the moment and although i've been asked how much deposit I have and where it has come from, the lender has never asked to see the money or bank statements to show I have it I dont think.

Approx process stages are:

- go see an independent whole of market fee free mortgage adviser who should be able to advise you how much you can afford to offer and explain the extra costs involved

- once you have had an offer accepted you then go do the mortgage application
- once offer accepted you pay for survey, chances are the estate agent will keep it n the market and continue to do viewings until they have confirmation from your mortgage adviser that you have paid for survey, thereby showing "committment"
- once you have the mortgage offer (subject to survey) then you are in business and the estate agent will take you much mroe seriously as you have proof that the bank will lend you enough to buy the property
- hopefully your survey will come back all clear, nothing major that will put you off buying it
- once you've had survey back then pay for the legal searches (c. £500) no point doing htis before survey comes back just in case there is something show-stopping in it
- i would also hold off asking your conveyancer to start with the enquireis until after the survey as it will incur you extra costs for this legal work, you might as well only incur these costs once survey has come back
- then let the conveyancer get on with it
- you can push through offer accepted to exchange in under a month I'd guess max but you do need to keep chasing your soliciotr and the seller needs to keep chasing theirs, none of this "1 week turn around for questions"

dorset_nurse

For my first place the lender asked to see evidence of my funds before they would approve a mortgage. That was pretty much in the first week of the process.

jungle_jane

To add to that, my deposit was the biggest headache of my whole application. Santander needed to see our deposit and how it had built up for money laundering purposes. As our deposit was £65,000 this was a huge pain. I ended up having to scan in about 60 pages of bank statements going back a year to show them each and every deposit that we had made.

Like Dorset Nurse we also had to show that we had the funds before our advisor would submit our application.

On the other hand, the house I am buying had another buyer before me and that sale fell through because when it came to the crunch they didn't actually have the full amount and were wanting to stall until August to gather the funds. They had gotten quite far down the application process by that stage so I guess it depends on your mortgage provider and even your advisor....