Use estate agent mortgage advisor yes or no?

2314sadie

Hi. Just a quick question I'm sure i've seen mentioned in this forum somewhere not to use estate agent finance/ mortgage advisor for mortgage. Why not? Friend of mine hoping to buy house and the estate agent offering £1000 off purchase price if she uses their financial services. I may have been mistaken and it wasn't on this forum I saw reference not use estate agent for mortgage... Sorry if I got it wrong but wanted to check! Thanks

originalmiscellany

Well you need to be careful with this - I'm thinking out loud, if they offer 1000 off the purchase price but you still need to pay them for other services, it might be tied into the mortgage, e.g. a house at 100k plus 1k fees as opposed to 2k fees.
If you end up paying the 1k over the life of the mortgage you could be better off paying up front. Best of luck!

amnblog

If you use the broker linked to the agent (the agent who is working for the vendor, not you the purchaser), the estate agent will know exactly what your financial situation is, and how much they can push you on price.

Not a good idea.

Also their brokers frequently work from limited panels of lenders.

Yorkie1

No.

Not a good idea.

welshwizard1927

I think there's probably less risk once your offer has been accepted - the estate agent's obligations are always to the seller, and therefore people tend to err with caution when it comes to the estate agent working for the buyer.

Always worth seeing what other independent all of the market brokers can offer before committing yourself to anything from the estate agents broker, in my view. Saying that we are waiting on a mortgage application and we went via the estate agents broker, but that was slightly different as the estate agent is owned by the lender that we've applied for the mortgage from.

kingstreet

Is this a "national" who will sell you a mortgage only from a small panel of lenders, charge a fee, sell you expensive poor-quality conveyancing and insurance products, or is it an independent mortgage broker attached to a small firm of agents?

ACG

You can never be sure whether the broker is biased towards the estate agent or not - most of their business comes from the estate agent, they sit in an office all day with the broker - so theyre probably also work mates... put yourself in the brokers shoes, where would your allegiances be?

Once they know your financial situation, they know what you can afford and guess what they will push towards - their commission is usually a percentage so its in their interest to get as much as possible.

How can they get £1000 off the purchase price? Thats the vendors decision.

vectistim

Generally two reasons:
1) Some people on here are scared that the in house mortgage person will pass all the financial information onto the estate agents to try and squeeze every last bit of money out of you for the house
2) Mortgage people in estate agency chains - they will normally be on some form of restricted panel rather than whole market access, and this will generally be their first financial job, so if you have some complication they may not be the best.

However, both of these issues are rather less likely to apply if the mortgage person is more experienced and operating from an independent estate agents.

ValHaller

The £1000 off is paid for by the vendor. A stupid scheme because the vendor might sell to you at say 103000 if you use the scheme, and drop the 1000 off making a total price of 102000, but if you don't use the scheme, they have more to play with and would probably let the place go for 102000

gilly33

I just got turned down by Santander after having gone through an estate agents broker. For 3 weeks I was going back and forward answering questions to the underwriters that shouldn't have come up. I've always used an independent broker but I was asked to wait a couple of weeks so he could get me a better deal due to my CCJ being registered not over 2 years at the time. When I told the estate agent he quickly put me through to their broker who convinced me that he had the best deal for me. Within 2 minutes I had a mortgage in principal at 2.29% ( and I have a CCJ ). I explained to the broker that I never use anyone other than my own broker because I'm a special case. Anyway my point is when something sounds too good to be true its because it is. Now the estate agent knows I've been having problems with a mortgage not that it bothers me too much because the sellers house that she wanted to buy has fallen through so theres no immediate rush but it could have put me in a very vulnerable position. Remember Estate agents are sales people and all they want is their commission and a quick sale.

reapz69

my next mortgage i will do myself and thats 100% I used a Fa and they did nothing pretty much and I have a lifetime membership with them!....