Mortgage taking over 6 weeks and no news- can we apply for another as backup?

mashmash90 · 19 July 2023 at 12:34PM

I am looking for some advice on what to do as I'm starting to get extremely anxious. We have been waiting for a mortgage offer for 6.5 weeks now and despite numerous chasing attempts, all the update I get is that they are chasing the mortgage centre but then not get any update. We have sold our flat in June and closed our mortgage product and they confirmed we can split-port within 6 months of the completion date to reopen it and benefit from our previous rate (1.09%) and get our ERC back (1.8K). We went direct with the lender once we found our new property on 3 June and submitted an application after a 2 hour call with a representative. Since then it took about 4 weeks to do a valuation, they then came back with a lower value, which we managed to renegotiate with the buyer as well as up our deposit by 5K to make up the shortfall. It's now been 2 weeks since that all happened and still no offer.

We are living with family in temporary accommodation and need to move ASAP, as do our sellers who are pushing for a completion date in mid August.

Realistically I don't think we can keep waiting with no update and are considering speaking to a broker to go with another lender and cut our losses on the interest rate (which will only be valid for about 6 months) and the ERC. Are we allowed to have more than 1 mortgage application at any one time so that we have a backup option? Or would we need to cancel our existing application to go with another option?

Can anyone think of another way we can speed the existing application along - can we ask to escalate it to someone more senior or something? I just don't know what the options are!

Note as I know someone will think it's a problem with our application: I don't think it's an affordability issue, we have a 79 LTV, and are borrowing about 2.5x our joint basic salary. We've never missed any payments etc.

I'm getting a bit ill over the stress of this as we have had awful luck with this whole buying & selling process and I just can't face another major hurdle.
Thank you for any advice.

housebuyer143 · 19 July 2023 at 4:04PM

You can go to another lender and do another application on the same property, it won't cause issues as you can't redeem two mortgage offers on the same property. I had two at one point on the house I bought.

Who is the application with? Some lenders have crazy long timescales.