Halifax error, not honouring applications made

sidneyvic

Get yourself a proper broker and bin these jokers off out of it.

tripled

You have my sympathies. L&C are a shower. We chose them because they feature on MSE, never again. With us, at least they got our application in to Halifax (in August), but since then their back office team are causing delays and screwing up at every turn, which is jeopardising our application and causing untold stress. Raise a complaint, and hopefully you can at least recover some of your financial losses from them.

HWBY

I've complained, but L&C's answer is essentially "no it's Halifax's fault. You can complain to them but I doubt you'll get anywhere."

I am so, so fed up of everything to do with this process!

Neilos9

If its Halifax fault the Application was submitted?
Yes in your post its says it was in a pile with L+C - 
L+C need to decide if it was submitted to lender or not.

london21

The free brokers are ok but the paid brokers will go the extra mile I think.

The system likely struggling to keep up with demand.

Halifax doubt they really care and will make any allowance. 

tripled

HWBY said:

I've complained, but L&C's answer is essentially "no it's Halifax's fault. You can complain to them but I doubt you'll get anywhere."

I am so, so fed up of everything to do with this process!

Complained, or raised a formal complaint?

https://www.landc.co.uk/contact-us/how-to-complain/

L&C would have been aware that lenders were pulling deals at short notice, it's been widely reported in the media. It sounds like Halifax's systems were working, albeit slowly. Did they warn you that they had a processing backlog and there was a risk of it not being submitted before the product was pulled?

K_S

I will step in here to somewhat defend L&C Not the part where they misrepresented the reason, but the part about the fault lying with Halifax.  

On Tuesday, the Halifax system was not able to cope with the number of brokers trying to submit applications before the deadline and so (based on my experience and anecdotes from peers in industry forums) it was taking 4-5 times as long as it normally would to submit an application - slow system, timeouts, page cannot be found, etc.

For most businesses (and especially larger volume firms like L&C/Habito/Trussle who depend on salaried employees who may not be particularly invested in a specific client or application), there is very little scope to adjust for such a slowdown especially when it involves a lender like Halifax that can make up as much as 10-20% of their overall residential business. I was lucky that I only had 2 short-notice Halifax applications to go that day. If I had any more, I would have had to prioritise and disappoint one or more clients.

I do give clear disclaimers to the clients for last minute applications that there is no guarantee that I will be able to secure the rate as large lender systems can and will buckle over at the slightest hint of increased volumes. Perhaps L&C could have set better expectations but unless they promised the OP of any specific turnaround times, I wouldn't expect a complaint to result in anything outside a small payment to try and dissuade the OP from taking it to the FOS and costing them a few hundred pounds.

Neilos9

'just had a call from our broker, our application for 4.08% that was made yesterday afternoon was apparently struck by a system error, and not processed by Halifax. They're refusing to accept it, so we have to apply again - the best rate now is 5.29% with Natwest.'

If L+C said this - then they are at fault - because its a lie.