Important updates to our guides

30/06/2010

Further to your feedback we’ve made a number of improvements to some of our guides. These changes are designed to clarify some points of confusion.

Lending guide:

We have created a new section – Buy to Let (background), which explains our maximum LTVs, if your customer has a BTL remaining mortgaged with Santander or Alliance & Leicester. If the LTV is exceeded, we will not accept the residential mortgage application to Abbey.

We have also restated, under Interest Only, our maximum mortgage term for interest only applications (without a funded investment vehicle) is 25 years.

We now confirm, within Portability, that it is not possible to port an existing Abbey mortgage to a property owned mortgage free.

In addition, we have created a new Refund of valuation fees section, to restate our refund policy for valuation fees.

From next month, we will include a new section on the front page highlighting what has changed within the guide.

Affordability Calculator:

We have noticed that some of you are not using the summary screen within the Affordability Calculator.  It is worth remembering that if you proceed beyond the maximum loan screen for low/medium and high credit scores, you will find the income totals summarised to match the Introducer Internet input screen. If you use these totals then the underwriters will have the same information as you entered into our affordability calculator.

We have updated our “How to assess affordability guide” to reflect this.

Income evidence requirements guide:

We have updated this guide to remind you we will accept online payslips as income evidence, however they must show the https address to be acceptable.

Application checklist:

Finally, we have updated our “Application checklist”. This is used by both our admin staff and our underwriters on every application. It is therefore worth using this to make sure that the application is correctly submitted. This will save you time and also lead to a quicker decision.


All the new guides can be found by clicking here