HBOS delaying mortgage offer

mircea

Hi everybody

Can someone please offer some advise on best course of action for our situation:

Our current mortgage deal expired this month. We sought to find a new deal in March and were AIP by HBOS on the 10th March, through Charcoal. The deal was 5.7% fixed for two years, no fees subject to 90% LTV.

We are now three months later and are yet to have the mortgage offer through. The whole process has been painfully slow - we addressed all the bank requests very promptly, if it was for documents or for information, yet it took them two months to organise our valuation. The valuation has been done last month, but the bank has now asked why we did not declare a £5k loan that is on our credit file and how comes that the 5k Egg loan we did declare is not on our credit file as they cannot find it!!! The mortgage broker at Charcoal is useless - we constantly have to chase her for updates and she has told us now three times that the offer is in the post, only to then say that the offer has not been posted because they want another bit of information like the one above or some ore documents etc.

I am totally at a loss to understand what is going on here as I would think we are in a fairly strong position:
- one good credit score, one fair score
-LTV has been confirmed by valuation as 90%
-mortgage is only 2 x joint income
-other debt is manageable - 30k Northern Rock + car.

It seems to me that the bank simply does not want to issue the offer and is purposely delaying this until we get fed up and pull out, or they are terribly incompetent! 3 months for a re-mortgage is definitely a long time.

The options I considered are:
1. Call the bank, arrange a face to face meeting, bring all our financial documents, information etc insist on mortgage offer issued on the spot
2. Call the bank, give them a deadline, let's say 14 days, if no offer in the post, go somewhere else and possibly bring a claim to the small claims court as well as a complaint to the FSA.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Many thanks.

money_maker_3

I think the problem may be with the mortgage adviser not putting things through quick enough as well as the bank not processing quick enough. Unfortunately, once a broker has started an app, very rarely can a branch adviser complete the application.
You can however phone the branch and ask them to check the status of your application and leave any information needed directly into the offices to be faxed directly to the service department that issue the offers.

Hopes this helps a bit

Tiddler_2

Whilst there is the odd hiccup (as always with large organisations) most brokers will tell you that the Halifax's service is generally pretty good, so I would guess that the problem is with your broker not passing on the requests for information quickly to you (and your responses, back to the Halifax).

The main problem is the rate you are getting is very good in the present market and so you want to do the best you can to keep it.

Small claims court threats won't get you anywhere as in their eyes you have not provided the relevant information they require to get the mortgage offer.

You could try going into a local branch to see if they tell you what information is outstanding, but they may be too interested in achieving their own targets to deal with broker's mess ups.

Now you may be able to get hold of the business development manager to find out what is happening, but you will need your Roll Number - and you could ask someone to contact you to go through some security questions to confirm they are speaking to the applicants.

email on one of the following addresses depending on the location of your Charcol adviser.

Scotland & NI
[EMAIL="bdmglasgow@halifax.co.uk"]bdmglasgow@halifax.co.uk[/EMAIL]
North East & Cumbria
[EMAIL="bdmnorthengland@halifax.co.uk"]bdmnorthengland@halifax.co.uk[/EMAIL]
North
[EMAIL="bdmmanchester@halifax.co.uk"]bdmmanchester@halifax.co.uk[/EMAIL]
Midlands & East Anglia
[EMAIL="bdmbirmingham@halifax.co.uk"]bdmbirmingham@halifax.co.uk[/EMAIL]
South Wales & West
[EMAIL="bdmcardiff@halifax.co.uk"]bdmcardiff@halifax.co.uk[/EMAIL]
London & South East
[EMAIL="bdmchatham@halifax.co.uk"]bdmchatham@halifax.co.uk[/EMAIL]


They won't thank me for posting their details but if you tell them the broker has been useless hopefully they will be able to help.

minimike2

LOL Tiddler...no they wont thank you! Haha!

Tiddler_2

Well I'm sure they won't be too busy processing broker cases at the moment!!

minimike2

Haha! Ahhhhhh good old revenge!

I actually placed a case with them today with a broker only lifetime tracker product! Heavans above!!!!

But ive lost three lots of business in the last two weeks due to thier direct pricing on low LTV fixes. I just cant bring myself not to tell people that its cheaper to go direct, even though I havent charged an advice fee. Thanks a bunch HBOS. LOL

mircea

Thanks everybody for the advice given, I will get in touch with the Business Development Manager and see what's gpoing on, otherwise it feels like we will spend the rest of our lives waiting for the offer to come through!!!

mircea

Hi everyone
We have now finally received our mortgage offer - exactly 3 months and two weeks after applying, with loads of hassle and puerile questions from the underwriters.
The biggest surprise is the offer is not worth the paper it's written on. It states that we can have the mortgage but only if we pay two loans off, around 6k. The bank has had our accounts and all the financial information: they know we only have £1200 of savings so what is the point in sending us an offer we cannot possibly accept?
HBOS wasted three months for us and we are now without a reasonable mortgage in place. I fully anticipated the tightning of the credit availability, following the US model, hence we applied for the mortgage three months before our deal expired. Most of those deals are now not available anymore and we will have to pay an extra 1% for another remortgage. In the current market, I am also worried that my house will not be valued high enough to give us a 90% LTV, like we had with HBOS. It feels like HBOS have pushed us into a tight corner and would really like to put in a complaint. Do we have any grounds? And also can anybody help with a remortgage?Thank you.

BoGoF

When i remortgaged with HBOS a couple of years back it was also in the offer that I clear some loans with the surplus funds. I didn't even notice this at the time only when I was checking something the other week. Needless to say I hadn't cleared these debts at the time and to be honest how will they know whether you do or not.

Personally I would just sign and see what happens. Duubtful you'll get as good a deal now.

money_maker_3

Unless they are secured loans that a solicitor would need to pay off, you can just say that you intend to and they will not check. But I didn't tell you that of course !!!!