Mortgage broker

SuziXX

Hi all,

I'm about to apply for a mortgage for the first time and wondering could someone pm me the name of a good mortgage broker in cork city/suburbs please?

Thanks in advance!

Samuel T. Cogley

Bear in mind a mortgage broker will limit your options. Only you know if you need specific advice but if you've at least 6 months to a year of consistent savings, no outstanding debt or other properties of failed relationships involving property hanging over you, just start with your bank. If you don't have the above start working towards them, make sure you've absolutely no negative balances ever, in any account and save as much as you can each month without taking it back out. If you've any debt get it paid down.

SuziXX

Thanks for the reply Libertarian Kant,we're meeting with our bank to apply next week having gathered all our documents.
Hopefully all goes well but although we save weekly and have no debt we don't fit neatly into the banks boxes! If we don't get approval from this bank I'd like to head straight to a broker for advice rather than going around to all the banks. Any suggestions still welcome!

Samuel T. Cogley

A broker won't mean you won't have to meet a bank's lending criteria. It's worth researching which banks are more likely to lend for a given set of circumstances. In my case it was temporary employment of the main bread winner, me working PT, neg equity in our apartment which we needed to keep. The broker looked at Haven (AIB) - couldn't lend enough, PTSB (who turned out to be moronically useless) and finally got in contact with someone at Ulster Bank.

We decided to go it alone and contacted BoI, straight no - don't even bother, we were quite grateful for the directness of the reply, EBS where we simply missed the affordability criteria based on our apartment and KBC who knew exactly what type of employment my wife was in (research) which is grant to grant basis so never permanent.

In our case a broker would have actually resulted in no mortgage, or one with some issues surrounding our current property. They can be helpful, however don't see them as the default position or them offering access to 'exotic' lenders like they used to ten plus years ago. As above they can even be counter productive as not all banks will deal with brokers. If you do a search here you should find a guy (albeit in Dublin) who is very highly regarded - worth seeing if you can Skype and Email him. Otherwise as you're doing get some PMs for local recommendations.

Thestones

We got approval for more going directly to banks than what a broker told us, wouldn't bother with them.

SuziXX

Thanks for the feedback guys, we've actually been around to 5 banks months ago for approval in principle. Our circumstances didn't seem to phase them they said it should be fine but they didn't seem to have come across it before.
I'm just wondering if we get rejected when it goes to the underwriter that we might need some help packaging and presenting ourselves! Hopefully it will be fine and I'm just overly worrying! Thanks for the replys again

athtrasna

Mod note

As per the forum charter, recommendations by pm only please