You have a chat with us to ensure we understand your goals and challenges.

We let you know what the costs look like and offer our professional services in checking the documents outlined below. This allows us to double-check our suggested solutions will work in practice, which is worth knowing as early as possible. Therefore, we offer to check these as early into your journey as you like. Your adviser will provide you with a personalise document list, so don’t worry about trying to figure out what we will need. Once we have these documents and are confident in the solutions discussed, we can also source you a…

This is just a credit check, not an agreement to lend, but it often means your offer on a property is likely to be taken more seriously by the seller/agent. It is also means you have the green light to submit a full application when the time comes. However, this can only be done once you have…

The lender will need to check your Identity.

They will also need to check your proof of address. Some high street lenders can often check and approve your ID and address proof electronically

The lender will check your expenditure. Again, certain high street lenders use national/regional average expenditure, rather than assessing your personal bank statements to see if the mortgage is affordable.

The lender will need proof of your income by way of payslips, tax calculations, full accounts, pension slips, benefit award letters and other documents dependent on the source of your income.

This often needs to be approved by the lender. Most commonly this would be a bank/savings account statement or a gifted deposit letter if coming from family.

For every mortgage, the lender needs a survey report from their own surveyor. This is to ensure the property is suitable (i.e. it doesn’t have serious structural problems and meets their lending criteria) and to ensure it is worth what you have agreed to pay for it.

In most cases an underwriter will need to look over the whole case once all the proofs are in and take responsibility for it. All being well, they are using their judgement and opinion to say that the lender should be lending to you and…

With a high street lender this normally takes around 2-4 weeks from full application. However during COVID, this is longer. Whilst some cases are flying through, due to backlogs at lenders and surveyors, a mortgage will take more like 4-6 weeks to get from full application to final mortgage offer. With a specialist lender, this could be more like 6-8 weeks.

Your mortgage payments need to be maintained every month for the full term. That’s a long time! The likelihood is that at some point, household income could drop or disappear due to sickness or one of you passing away. Therefore, at this stage we help you review what protection you already have (through existing policies or work benefits) to highlight shortfalls. 

Alongside the mortgage process you will also need to liaise with a solicitor/conveyancer in order to purchase a property. The timescales for this are difficult to predict as the individual completing the legal work for you is reliant on third parties in order to do so. We can send our Advantage legal work guide to you to help get you as well organised for this as possible, but please check timescales and requirements directly with your solicitor as they will know better than we do!