Mortgage Agreement in Principle Confusion

RGreenthumb

Hi,

Forgive me if I'm just being dense with this question, but I'm a FTB and it's quite a confusing world out there!

Exactly 13 days ago my boyfriend and I went into Halifax and got a mortgage agreement in principle from them. This agreement included the offer of having our stamp duty paid in full. At no point was it mentioned that this offer had less than two weeks left to run.

We had an offer accepted on a house on Monday, and upon googling the offer I've discovered it expired on Sunday. Am I right in assuming that even though we had the offer on our agreement in principle, we won't be able to make use of this offer and will have to find £1500 from somewhere?

I'm pretty bummed that the mortgage advisor didn't tell us the offer only had a few days left of being valid as it did affect the property we offered on, thinking we had an extra £1500 deposit to play with. I suppose it's our fault for being naive and not checking...

R_P_W

Things can be withdrawn without notice. The advisor may not have been aware.

RGreenthumb

R_P_W wrote: »

Things can be withdrawn without notice. The advisor may not have been aware.

Maybe not, but it seems unlikely since according to Google the deal was only ever going to run until 7th July.

Thrugelmir

RGreenthumb wrote: »

Maybe not, but it seems unlikely since according to Google the deal was only ever going to run until 7th July.

What reference are you referring to?

dumpallhere

Are you saying that the AIP mentions the stamp duty paid offer in writing but not the expiry date of the offer?

My AIP (Halifax) makes no mention of the promotion. It only mentions (in effect) that Halifax promises to lend £XX.XX if I were to make a mortgage application within a month.

The KFI does ..

RGreenthumb

dumpallhere wrote: »

Are you saying that the AIP mentions the stamp duty paid offer in writing but not the expiry date of the offer?

My AIP (Halifax) makes no mention of the promotion. It only mentions (in effect) that Halifax promises to lend £XX.XX if I were to make a mortgage application within a month.

The KFI does ..

Ah, you're right. It was never made clear to us that those were two different documents. I guess that means we'll be paying our own stamp duty.

I know I could have checked before this point but it does just feel a little bit naughty of Halifax to tell us about the offer, print it out on a document at the same time as the AIP and fail to tell us it was only running for ten more days. Since it ended on a Sunday, realistically we'd have had to have found and had an offer accepted on a property within 6 days of our meeting, so I do think they should have at least told us the date the offer ended.

Thrugelmir

RGreenthumb wrote: »

I know I could have checked before this point but it does just feel a little bit naughty of Halifax to tell us about the offer, print it out on a document at the same time as the AIP and fail to tell us it was only running for ten more days.

Mortgage products can and are pulled overnight. When the available funds are used then a product is withdrawn.

RGreenthumb

I'm not allowed to post links as I'm a new forum user but googling "Halifax Stamp Duty offer" brings up an article on this very website from May that states the offer will end on the 7th July. Then further down, an article from thisismoney.com dated 30th April (the first day of the offer) states the same ending date.

I find it hard to believe Halifax didn't know this offer was only valid for 10 more days when I met with them...

Yorkie1

Many people get an AIP on one day and proceed to full mortgage offer the same day or very soon thereafter.

The Halifax was not to know when the OP might or might not eventually put in the mortgage application.

okborednow

Just FYI Halifax in fact pulled this deal early. it ended as of 28/06 so you definitely wouldn't have been able to get the offer.

Ruthhelenjohn

We wanted this deal, and applied for our mortgage on June 28th, we haven't had the offer as of yet (valuation done yesterday) but we have been assured we would get the stamp duty paid deal if everything else is ok.