First Time Buyer Mortgage with the Halifax

bmd1980

a few weeks ago my partner and myself had a meeting with a mortgage advisor at the halifax. We were offered a 90% LTV mortgage where halifax would pay the stamp duty if the property was worth up to £250,000. during the meeting we were asked what sort of properties we had in mind and we said we would look at anything, ranging from new build flats, houses converted into flats, literally anything that was on the market in our price range.
we were given a mortgage promise document and told that if we found somewhere to show this to the estate agent to prove we had finances in place.
to cut a long story short we found a property at the weekend and put an offer in. On calling halifax to tell them this and that we needed a survey they then said as the property was a new build flat we would in fact need a 20% deposit. This had not been mentioned at any stage before and is totally at odds with the information given previously and it now looks like we will lose the property that the offer has been accepted on.
Can they do this? Do we have any rights in this situation as the bank were fully aware of the types of properties we were looking at and it was never an issue at any stage before??

kingstreet

Halifax limits its lending on newbuild flats to 80%. That is standard. Unless you specifically asked about, or mentioned, you might buy a newbuild flat and were given incorrect information, there's nothing that could be done.

If you use the NewBuy scheme, or Help To Buy, this will remove this problem, but as it stands you can't proceed with Halifax.

Did you speak to the builder's broker as they should have picked this up before you reserved.