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Maintaining a professional responsibility
The economic climate demands competitive, flexible and responsible products for first-time buyers and movers – but what if they don’t fit mainstream?
The modern economic climate continues to place even greater demands on the mortgage market to generate competitive, flexible yet responsible products to help both potential first-time buyers onto the property ladder and existing owner occupiers to reach the next rung. However, many borrowers continue to slip down the mainstream lending criteria cracks. This is not necessarily down to bad credit ratings; rather it’s patchy employment histories or being held back by excessive outgoings but due to life events, their employment status, having too many income streams or simply being that bit older than what has traditional been seen as the ‘average’ borrower.
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We recently had a case where a 50-year old self-employed dentist was looking to purchase a residential property after becoming a widower but due to having several sources of income and given his age, his broker struggled to place him with a mainstream lender. Due to having the manual underwriting capabilities to consider 100% of this income in our calculations, and with his profession not involving manual labour, were able to meet his borrowing requirements and offer a mortgage term up the age of 75.
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Since we launched our Professionals mortgage range towards the end of 2021, it has played an increasingly important role within our overall residential proposition and has become an extremely popular option amongst our intermediary partners. It has also opened the door to plenty of feedback along the way around how we can extend availability from an eligibility and criteria perspective to allow a wider variety of client types to secure such a product. It led us to expand the eligible professions – without diluting the professional tag - and to look at moving our minimum age down to the same as our standard residential offering.
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In some cases, 6x income may be available for residential applicants who sit within this professional bracket and it can also encompass a wide range of different incomes. The second applicant doesn’t even need to be classed as a professional, as long as the primary applicant is and their income is sustainable. And, having the ability to liaise directly with our underwriters means our BDM team are able to get a quick decision for those brokers who have already gone through the process on the high street and failed. This means that the specialist mortgage market is swiftly becoming the first alternative rather than the last.
*This article was originally published on Specialist Finance Introducer
