Your Move Brokers - vent

SeduLOUs

Just a whinge about the broker I dealt with at Your Move Estate Agents.

For back story, I had an offer accepted and a mortgage approved with the Halifax to a house value of £120k (borrowing £80k) and an agreement in principle prior to that for significantly more (they were willing to lend around £120k on top of my deposit). The house fell through, and I offered on a new house at £124k via Your Move. My mortgage offer was within 3 months but the AIP was over 3 months old at this point.

Your Move insisted I speak to their broker before they were willing to put my offer forward to the vendor, as he apparently needed reassurance. I had some free time and just played along as I thought it wouldn't do any harm to see if they could get me a better deal anyway, but was very clear I was happy with my current broker and mortgage option.

Your Move broker came up with a mortgage that would cost me £50 per month more than the offer I already had, and wanted £500 fees upfront. My broker only charges £300 and that is only paid on completion. For me it was a no brainer, but it didn't stop her spending the best part of an hour trying to persuade me that hers was a better option.

They still refused to put my offer forward without a valid AIP (that she wanted me to pay her to provide), and in the end I had to go back to my broker and get a new AIP and undergo another credit check just to get my offer considered. My broker thought the whole thing was ridiculous considering I'd had an actual mortgage offer, despite the small change in house price which was covered by the original AIP.

The Your Move broker also pushed an extremely hard sell on illness insurance and life policies. During the last purchase I've already considered these options in great detail but have decided against for now as I have no spouse, no children and 12 months of sick pay cover, and besides that she was only able to quote from a single firm anyway, so even if I did want them I'd want to shop around.

I held my ground and we are now proceeding with my original broker and without insurance, but I felt extremely pressured and came out of the whole thing feeling pretty stressed out. They have phoned me and left voicemail messages almost every day since wanting to quote me for insurance.

If I ever sell I'll be giving them more than a wide berth!

RancidM

They tried exactly the same thing with us.
we put an offer of 300k on a property of theirs.

£200k was funded by the sale of our house and we had an AIP from our current lender (which was a life time base rate tracker offset)

your move refused to put our offer forward to the vendor until we had been financially qualified and the only person who could do that was an approved mortgage broker of theirs.

it was suggest that the the person at the branch arranging the meeting with the broker would get a kick back.
if you as the buyer take the mortgage via the broken then an even bigger kickback would be in order.

it was also suggested that your move would tell the vendor that its better to go with a buyer who used their broker as the broker has better "insight" into the mortgage application.

after that I skipped any house being sold by them.

SeduLOUs

RancidM wrote: »

it was also suggested that your move would tell the vendor that its better to go with a buyer who used their broker as the broker has better "insight" into the mortgage application.

I'm certain this is true! Except they told me that this idea came purely from the vendor and that he had specifically said that he would prefer someone who was willing to go through their brokers. I called them out on this being nonsense and that I wasn't willing to spend £100s more just to 'please' the vendor (not that I believed a word of it). Fortunately they backed down.