IFA vs face to face application

carlo

Hi, My partner and I are FTBs and have had an offer accepted on a house. We got a sizeable chunk knocked off the price (£210k down to £186k) because of the state of the market at the moment but when it's come to the mortgage application the market's come back to bite us.

My partner has adverse credit (one default settled a month ago) but my credit rating's pretty good. We both earn in excess of £30k so we can well afford the house, but the best deal our IFA could find was 8.14% with £2,700 arrangement fees making an effective rate of 8.6%! (for a 2 year deal. The next best rate was on a 5 yr deal - obviously we want to be able to remortgage as soon as my partner's credit has improved and we can get a cheaper deal)

We were thinking about trying a couple of building societies for face to face applications on the basis that it would be a human being who might be able to use more discretion than a call centre and could acknowledge we've got one isolated blemish and otherwise we're a safe bet.

Are we completely wrong? And if we do have a chance of a better deal, which building societies are the least risk averse?

many thanks in advance

dunstonh

IFAs are primarily investment advisers. Many IFAs employ mortgage advisers or have mortgage advisers attached to their firm. You may find that a mortgage adviser is a better option than an IFA as mortgages are all a mortgage adviser does.

I doubt walking the high street will be time well spent. Try a different independent mortgage broker if you want a second opinion.

Tiddler_2

If you can give us a few more details we may be able to point you in the right direction.

Is it a new build property that you are buying?
What deposit do you have?
When was the default taken out and How much was it for?

It could well be that the IFA was just being a little lazy and going straight for an option such as First National.

A lot of the larger High Street lenders don't operate on an individual case basis, as they credit score applications and if "computer says no" then they won't look at it. You are more likely to get a sympathetic ear at the smaller building societies.

carlo

Thanks Tiddler

Funnily enough the mortgage is with GE Money, but it refers to First national at one point... do 1st national underwrite ge money's mortgages?

The default was for £7k from about 3 years ago.
It's not a new build, but the vendor had agreed to a vendor paid deposit (but our ifa says that halifax etc aren't interested in us so we can't use it).
We can get a 10% deposit from my parents.

superged

With the state of the market that product seems reasonable. Very few lenders have any sort of discression and the ones that did are not using it. Due to the recency of clearing the default I reckon that will be about your best bet. Over a year after its cleared Chelsea would consider it on ordinary terms. GE Money are part of GE group the biggest company in the world. First National are a brand of GE Money.

Conrad

Some lender you might want to try;

C & G
SALT
SCARBOROUGH BS - ignore defaults, so they said a few weeks back to me
MORTGAGE EXPRESS - ignore defaults but still you need a good overall score!

COVENTRY - try them direct for the reason you gave

carlo

thanks for your opinions - we've decided to go with the ge money offer and try and get another couple of grand knocked off the house price to soften the blow (no harm in asking!).

Wutang_2

Conrad - bad advice I am sorry...firstly you shouldnt really encourage the already adverse to have more searches and despite not knowing what deposit they have:
C & G - absolutely no chance
SALT - 85%
SCARBOROUGH BS - ignore only historic small defaults if they can be explained
MORTGAGE EXPRESS - declining everything
COVENTRY - need a good score and default needs to be 3 years old

careful..!

herbiesjp

I know it's not much, but if you are looking at that deal, some exclusives will offer a free basic mortgage valuation with that rate

minimike2

Its the amount of the default that will be doing the damage. There may still be another company that would do it, but proper research needs to be done following a full fact find.

GE (First National is one of thier trading styles) are one of the first that comes to mind as ignoring defaults, but then there are others that will ignore them as long as you have enough deposit.