Buying new house off plan. Should I get a new mortgage offer?

drewziph

Hi,

I am in the process of buying my first house with my partner. It is a new build and I am buying using the governemns help to buy (equity loan) scheme with a 5% deposit.

As we are buying off plan, our mortgage offer has been in place since August. We have exchanged contracts and expect to complete at the end of November.

I have 2 main questions:

1) Am I likely to get a better mortgage if I go through the process again now? I notice a lot of lenders are still lowering their rates currently.

The mortgage rate of my current offer is 3.6% for a 2 year fix from Halifax. They are one of only a few lenders that consider income from fixed term contracts. One of us is employed full time, but the other is on a fixed term contract until Sept 2015. Other than this, we are comfortable we pass any affordability checks.

I was wondering whether Halifax own rate for people in my situation would have dropped in this time, or if I would just complicate things and jeapordise the completion date?

2) Is there anywhere to compare the mortgages that are available to me online? The only 5% deposit mortgages I can seem to find on comparison sites are at a much higher rate as they are not for help to buy equity loan customers.

I know changing at this stage could be quite troublesome, but I am also aware that any decrese in interest rate could make a huge difference in the first few years of a mortgage.

Thanks all

kingstreet

Halifax HTB - EL rates have been the same for ages, as they really want to reduce their exposure to shared equity business;-

3.64% two year fixed with £999 fee
or
3.94% two year fixed with £0 fee.

I would not be trying to find a new mortgage with a month to completion.

drewziph

Thanks for the quick response and for confirming my thoughts. I just wanted to check instead of finding out at a later date there was a better option.

This leads me back to my second question - I could have reached that conclusion myself had I known where to find the h2b el rates. Is there somewhere I can see these without speaking to a broker?

kingstreet

Yes. Go into the website of the lenders offering such products and find those which are available on HTB - EL cases.

They may be described as HTB - Equity Loan, or Affordable Housing. Some lenders do offer "normal" products upto 75% on HTB - EL, so carefully check if nothing is mentioned that they will lend on that basis.

Some of the lenders lending on the scheme, such as Skipton and Virgin Money are only open to certain brokers, so you may not see their products at all, without a broker involved.