Each week, we also round-up the best comments, emails and letters to the site and pick one reader contribution as our Star Letter. This week’s award goes to:
Letter to the editor: quality in the industry
I have no issue with the lenders’ campaign for the push to quality of business and submissions but I would love to see this applied both ways and can quote from my experiences this morning:
Lender had incorrectly sent an e-mail to the client’s solicitors on 20/11/13 stating that the case had been declined when after further discussions with the underwriter the case had been re-instated on 14/11/13.
You may or may not be surprised to learn that they didn’t bother to tell me about this little bombshell. Lender had asked for employer address details – which had previously been provided on certified copy payslips – after advising me yesterday that underwriting had been completed and the case was ready to proceed to formal offer.
Lender had informed me that a letter of authority for account information had not been received at their offices on the same day that their mortgage services team rang the clients to discuss the said letter.
Being a professional within this industry I didn’t feel that I should name the lenders concerned but all I got from them was “oh, sorry” – a totally unsatisfactory response in my opinion.
Add this to the fundamental puzzle of HMRC’s SA302 which can take 10 working days to be received by the clients and the need to see original posted to home address bank statements even when certified copies downloaded from lenders own websites have been submitted, what chance have brokers/clients/estate agents and solicitors got of meeting target completion dates of anything less than eight weeks since offer to purchase?
The mortgage industry always used to pride itself on being able to turn a case around in one to two weeks and that the clients would be waiting for the legal work – I can clearly state “not any more, my friends” and I don’t expect MMR will improve matters at all.
As a postscript to my essay I have some good news – home-mover case submitted online to Woolwich on 08/11/13 has been assessed, valuation done and offered by 19/11/13, so metaphorically the gauntlet is now down to the rest of the lending community.
John Morgan
