As a specialist mortgage broker, we’re always hunting down new lending products and providers to ensure our offering is as diverse and flexible as possible. Our core expertise is in offering solutions for large mortgages, and this experience has led us to increasingly help people looking for mortgages of all sizes whose situations may be just that little bit more complex.
Our motto is, ‘Our clients don’t tick boxes; neither do we’ and we think this is a really good way of summing up what we do. There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach at Large Mortgage Loans. We take complex lending situations and find solutions. We consider cases for clients who have non- standard underwriting criteria which cannot be facilitated through high street lenders for large mortgages, overseas property purchases, and any complex income structures that potential clients may have.
So, what trends are we seeing? Increasingly, we’re finding greater flexibility and responsiveness from building societies, specifically the smaller, regional mutuals.
During the second quarter of 2018, building societies approved 120,681 mortgage loans, representing a 30% share of the 406,677 mortgage loans approved across the market1. So what is the difference between a bank and building society mortgage, and why are building societies consistently featuring in ‘best buy’ listings?
Bank vs building society
The way the Building Societies Association describes it, building societies work ‘for people, not shareholders’2. Customers are members of a society, with a say in how it operates. Therefore, if you have a more complex need, it’s likely it can be met.
Mark Bogard is the Chief Executive of the Family Building Society, a lender we work with. It specialises in providing mortgage solutions to modern families, helping every generation to own a home through specialist family mortgages and later life lending products.
He says organisations like the Family Building Society can be more flexible in their underwriting processes. “In our case, we manually assess each new mortgage application without the use of credit scoring. That means one of our experienced underwriters will look at the circumstances of the application to see if we can help. As a result, we can try to be more flexible than some of the larger lenders.”
Building societies and specialist offerings
According to the Office for National Statistics, multi-family households are the fastest growing UK household type, up 41% over the decade to 2017. We recently worked with the Family Building Society on a loan for a family based offshore. In line with this growing trend, the family were looking to purchase one, larger home to accommodate the growing generations. However, the clients would have been in their 80s when their new mortgage term ended, prohibiting them from most High Street offerings. The Family Building Society’s specialist approach to later life lending was, therefore, a perfect fit in this instance.
Ex pats looking for buy to let products are catered for
Another area in which we’ve experienced a greater deal of flexibility is ex pat lending, specifically in the buy to let sector. As highlighted in our previous blog, this is a specialist offering, which can be incredibly complex. Earning in different currencies, holding dual nationalities and tax domicile are all factors to contend with and we have a number of specialists on our team here at Large Mortgage Loans who have found the best possible deal for clients with building societies.
Engage with a broker that can offer you the best network
Of course, it takes years to build up the network and knowledge to know how to access these specialist lending offerings. Once you’ve found the right provider, you need to know how to present complex cases and gather together all of the information the underwriters need to approve funding. It’s a role we’ve spent the last 15 years learning, honing and sharing with our clients and the reason our team love what we do. It’s a challenging space and every day we get cases which excite and inspire us to seek out a different approach. If you think we can help, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
https://www.bsa.org.uk/statistics/bsa-statistics
https://www.bsa.org.uk/information/consumer-factsheets/for-people,-not-shareholders
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