53% of brokers unable to help adverse credit borrowers

In the latest Mortgage Solutions poll, over 30% of brokers said they were able to place up to 25% of the applicants who approached them with adverse credit records last year.

Meanwhile, 12% of brokers said they placed up to 75% of the adverse credit borrower cases that presented themselves, while just 3% said they were able to find a lender in the vast majority of cases.

This follows on from the latest Credit Insight report from Moody’s which showed that over a third of non-conforming borrowers are currently in arrears, so would fail to qualify for a mortgage under the FSA's proposed transitional arrangements.

Fahim Antoniades, group director at Mortgage Centre IFA said: “I’m surprised that more brokers aren’t having more difficulty placing cases for people with imperfect credit records. It’s bad enough trying to get credit approved for somebody who has got no adverse credit, yet alone someone who has.

“On the back of these results, I would be encouraged to think that there is hope for these types of borrowers. But I can’t imagine that the level of adverse credit that we’re talking about here would be anything major like bankruptcy and countless CCJs.”

Under proposed new rules in the MMR expected in 2013 at the earliest, self-certified mortgages won't exist and all borrowers will be expected to fully verify their income.

Antoniades added that the “dust is settling” on the number of hoops lenders have to jump through to help adverse credit borrowers.

“I would hope that the market sticks to what has already been published under the MMR. There needs to be a period of monitoring and reviewing to see how the MMR positively and negatively affects this market before we start tinkering again. I would hope that this is the stance and position of the regulator has as well.

Looking ahead, he added that current housing market conditions could become the new ‘norm’.

“It’s very difficult to predict where the market is heading. There are a lot of economic and demographic forces which could be here for a very long time. I think it may be time that we start to accept that what we’ve got now may be the norm to come for a decade or so.”