Mortgages, who is lending the most at the moment?

Having left the property market 6 months ago I am now looking at getting back on, but with a single salary not many banks are lending that much, any ideas who is lending the most?

It will largely depend on what loan to value you will be looking at?

If you have a 50% deposit the banks will smile at you, if you have a 10% deposit they will see you as a risk and lend accordingly (or not at all).

4 x salary should still be available and more than that if your circumstances fit in with their lending criteria.

there are lots of mortgage products around and as Tall has said its mostly down to proportion of deposit you have. Get an IFA on the case, they usually know more than anybody else about possibilities.

Get an IFA on the case

Like the useless clot I just saw… After spending 30 minutes going through all my details with him, he proudly announced the very best deal he could do (because of his access to the 'whole mortgage market') was a £610 a month repayment, variable rate.

I told him that after 5 minutes on one of the money websites I had found one that offered a like-for-like deal (20 years, standard variable rate, no up front fees, no early repayment penalty) for just £560 a month.

Nkob-end.

I've tried a few of those sites to see what people will lend me and it comes out really low, but then when I tried Halifax and Alliance and Leicester they would give me at least £20K more, are any of those sites actually worth trying to find out the amount you can burrow?

Went to see the mortgage advisor yesterday, by the looks of it I can afford a shed, yippeeeeeeeeee.

When I bought my first property a 10% deposit was seen as really good, now if you only have 10& the rates are the higher side of 7%, I have to lower what I'm looking for until my deposit is 15% and then the rates drop to 4.5-5%.

Hmmm buy a flat or keep renting?

Make sure any mortgage advisor you see is directly authorised by the FSA because if they are not, even if they claim to be whole of market, they will be very unlikely to have access to every lender. Also keep in mind that not every lender will deal with mortgage advisors now days, some will only deal with consumers direct and any advisor should point this out to you.

TBH its a bit of a mine field at the moment and alot of these websites which search for the best rates etc etc are unable to take in to account sepecific lenders criteria so, although there may be a lender offering a cheaper product, you may not be able to access it as you don't "tick all the boxes" for that particular product (HSBC are a nightmare for this at the moment with less than 15% of applicants who apply for their best rate being offered it and its only after a 4 interview sales process that you will know which product they will offer you). Also these sites are unable to offer advice. You will only ever get advice from an advisor who is not working for a bank/building society or out of an estate agents (if they tell you they can offer you advice they are lying as they are just sales people NOT advisors). Just because an advisor can only get you a higher priced product than is available elsewhere if you go direct doesn't make them a n0b, mastiles_fanylion.

If you can't afford what you want to buy at the moment then stay put because the housing market is static in most parts of the UK and the availablity of mortgages for higher loan to value applicants is very slowly getting better but its still got a long way to go.

to be honest, I trawled the WWW then took what i found to an independant advisor. He checked them out and found that he could not beat what i had found. He then checked it out and said my find was a good and 'safe' so advised me to go with that (40% deposit, tracking Bank of E at + 0.49%, offset against all our other accounts, no tie-in, fully flexible, £999 fee). First Direct (HSBC)

We've had that now for 8 months and it's been very good.

I think they are still doing it but the +0.49% has gone up a bit.

C

Just because an advisor can only get you a higher priced product than is available elsewhere if you go direct doesn't make them a n0b, mastiles_fanylion.

IMO it does – flashing his credentials about how he can access the whole market and get me the best deals available when a complete novice like myself easily found a better product over the course of the deal than he could. And I 'ticked all the boxes' when checking online.

So he was either a useless nkob or a thieving nkob promoting the deal which gave him the best commission.

Either way he was a nkob.

I'm coming to a similar impass at the moment, have coming on for 10% saved, but it seems that sticking in the cheap flat renting, no DIY and saving more like a 15-20% desposit is a better idea in this market, but I have lived there 6 years now, am getting itchy feet and the cash is burning a hole in my pocket, keep looking at cars (despite having amassed a massive 8k miles in the past 12 months on my current rarely used car), tv's and other high value items. Saving is growing tedious, even though I spent plenty this year anyway.

Really i just don't have enough money, what I'm looking at paying in rent would be similar to a mortgage and won't allow me to save anymore money.

Hmmm, how can I make £20K quickly?

Remember when calculating what you can afford that the interest rates are sure to go back up at some point.

Of course you are welcome to your opinion but I'm afraid that its the FSA (Financial Services Authority) who dictate what an advisor can call his access to the market.
The term Whole of Market doesn't really always mean whole of market. The official definition is "a company who has access to lenders who are representitive of the whole of the market" that is all a whole of market advisor has to offer. As a result there are loads of mortgage advisors, mainly based in estate agents or appointed representives of larger, sometimes life insurance, companies who can call themselves whole of market but in reality may only have a dozen lenders that they can use because the larger company they are linked to say so.

Its wrong and needs clarifying but until the FSA do something about it its going to continue to happen and the public will lose out.

So i would say that he has misled you, unless he advised you that he couldn't access ALL lenders in the mortgage market in which case he has made you aware that there are deals he can't access.

Don't let it put you off using advisors but make sure that you go armed with the facts.

You'll get more out of 1 meeting with a good whole of market advisor than you will by spending the whole afternoon speaking directly to the sales reps at the banks.

Oh i forgot to mention that there is a big difference in fitting the profile that the web search engine uses and the lenders criteria.

Just because the search engine says the product is avaialbe to you doesn't mean that the lender will see it the same way as the lenders forms take alot more info than the search engine will. For a start a web search engine will not credit socre you where as a lender will.

You may well be fine in which case good luck to you but where people don't tick all the lenders boxes is where a good advisor can be useful.

We've just got a 'preferential' one with Leeds via an advisor. Sting in the tail is the the Home / Contents Insurance has rocketed as we have to change, £90 extra a month FFS.

We just got 3.98% fixed for two years on a 25 year £90,000 mortgage for a £156,000 house, with Darlington Building Society, via an IFA.

We are really luck to have bought our first house in 2000. My younger brothers and sisters don't stand a chance of buying anytime soon.

Like the useless clot I just saw…

IFAs used by a couple of members of my family have utterly screwed up their savings by poor investments and mis-advising them, then charging them for doing it.

If they're so good at advising, why are they not loaded by the time they're 35 and living off the profits?!