Mortgages - how long for acceptance?

EddScott

EddScott

EddScott

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Passed my documents onto the mortgage adviser and asked him how long the process was going to take. Was stunned when he said it averages about 6 weeks!

I really didn't think it takes that long.
 
You should have a decision in principle within a few days which means that the mortgage has passed your credit check and they now want to check that the figures stack up and the house is worth what you say it is.

That's the time consuming bit though so that can take a while.
 
physichull said:
I went into the bank at 10am one morning and came out of the bank at 10:30am with a mortgage in principle.

Pretty easy really. What process is it exactly you are talking about?
Click to expand...

A mortgage in principle is not a mortgage agreement though. As the OP has discovered, mortgage agreements can take much longer as they are dependent on valuation surveys etc being conducted.
 
A decision in principle, in reality, means nothing. It took me 20minutes to get this from the bank and even less time for them to wriggle out of it once I had found a property within budget. This is only useful to get estate agents to take you seriously.

In the end once I had found a property and submitted all of my paperwork it took 3/4 working days to get a decision and a further 3 weeks to get the valuation survey done and everything rubber stamped.
 
6 weeks is a stupid amount of time. An agreement in principle is merely based on what you submit to the lender. They will state that as long as what you have said is true and you can prove it they will lend X amount.

Does the advisor work for the lender, or do you mean broker? If it is a broker it sounds to me like they will hawk around for the business.

It should really not take more than one day.
 
Have a DIP already. Got that even before we started looking. I do work in the financial services sector but we don't really do mortgages so I asked someone who does. I already have a mortgaged home and I needed a lender that would ignore my current lending if I had confirmation from a letting agency my current mortgage would be covered by rental payments. Our mortgage is about a third what the rental payments would be so it can be ignored by some lenders. Halifax is the lender.

Before I put in an offer I had a survey carried out. Recently we''ve seen increased demand for clients putting commercial property into their pensions and that needs a survey every time. The surveyor we use in work surveyed the house, we had a chat about a few things that bothered me, and I put in the offer which was accepted. We're not in any rush to move so it's no big deal but I was surprised to hear 6 weeks. Hopefully that's worse case.
 
6 weeks sounds too long to me. Assuming you've supplied all the paperwork I'd have thought it should be done in half that. First house (and mortgage!) we got took 6 weeks all in (offer accepted to completion).
Second house move I can't remember but it was no more than a few weeks to arrange the mortgage.
 
EddScott, if you mean the time from buying the house to getting the keys so that you can move in, then it's usually 8 weeks. Surveys, insurance, mortgage set up etc all take place somewhere in those 8 weeks. The annoying thing is that although they provisionally say 8 weeks, you won't know the day you get given the keys until the very day itself. Thankfully my boss was understanding and I was able to move my annual leave days around the moving in weekend.
 
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