Now that we figured out the only way to buying a house is to go through the elaborated maze of mortgage application; let’s discuss the two most obvious paths:

  1. Personal application
  2. Going through a mortgage broker

We did debate about doing everything on our own but after a bit research we realized that there are many advantages in going through a broker. Also beside AIB; that is the only bank to my knowledge with fully electronic mortgage application system; you need to prepare yourself for a lot of printing, reading and filling of forms.

Why a broker?

There are more than few advantages using a broker. The main one is that you eliminate the hassle of applying for each mortgage provider separately. Although this doesn’t necessary means that your application will be sent to all available mortgage brokers and you still need to fill separate forms for each one but. In order to help this process, there are two main steps done by the broker. First they go through a document called mortgage fact find. This document covers anything from your smoking habits, how much of a risk taker you are and more usual question related to your job, pension and savings. Usually they work on an estimate of the property price you are willing to buy. Base on the fact find, the broker evaluates how strong your mortgage application will be and recommend you as such. Next document that you will need to fill on your own is a general template for a mortgage application that alongside the fact find will be used for filling all mortgage providers’ application forms. Couple of other advantages of using a broker are as follow:

They know exactly what parts of the applications are mandatory and what parts are optional. This is very important regarding the consent form for Consumer Credit Act 1995 that bank will try to get your confirmation on. We didn’t signed as recommended and actually one of the banks was about to drop our application because of it and our broker fought our corner and made the bank take back their request and continue with our application.

Another good advantage is that they can ask banks for mortgage exceptions. These exceptions are given to very few number of mortgages that qualify for them. Some example are exception to higher mortgage than the 3.5 times salary limit, longer mortgage term and etc. Although you need to have a perfect credit score foe these exemptions. For example we couldn’t apply for any as we had a car PCP.

Finally, mortgage brokers are aware of new mortgage products that are not released publicly yet and can advise you to wait for a better product from specific banks.

On the cons; mortgage broker add another step between you and the banks making progress a bit slower. In our case they went through banks we filled forms for one by one. We were under the impression that they would do them all at the same time but that didn’t seemed to be the case. They also have the tendency to main stream the process which is very good for experience applicants but for first time buyers things can get very confusing and words get lost in communication. As an example, we were very clear for our mortgage term to be 30 years as both applicants are pensioned. There was a bit of miscommunication and both the bank and the mortgage broker assumed one of us didn’t had any pension plan due to the fact that there was no pension payment reflected in the payslips. It took us few emails back and forth to convince them that there is a pension plan in place and finally got our term extended.

At the end of the day, we were pretty pleased with our broker service and they got a good deal among the products on the offer. The whole process took around 2 months and it cost us 500 euros. They are brokers who won’t charge as they already get a payment from the bank in case of a successful mortgage application.