How long to get the mortgage offer?

[sammylilac]

Starting to stress and fear the worst. In a chain of four, our seller doesn't need a mortgage and is moving into chain free. We are selling to first time buyers. Agreement in principle done (halifax) our broker sent everything off yesterday. Just spoken to the solicitor who said we can either pay the £500 odd fee for them to start the searches now OR hold off until we get our mortgage sorted. We've gone for the latter but apparently she said it might be a couple of weeks...

Really hoping to move before Christmas and also not p*ss off the rest of those in our chain!

We applied on a Saturday and got our offer on the Tuesday. So pretty quick. That was Nationwide. Hopefully yours will be similar

Offer came through the next day (subject to valuation).

I’d already started searches.

I've not used Halifax so I might not be much help but I've just had a mortgage approved by Leeds building society (first time buyer) and it was approved in just over a week.

I think my broker applied on the 29th July and I received confirmation that it had been approved on the 6-7th August so not long.

Sorry - that was with Santander.

I think ours was a week, the whole time I was a nervous wreck thinking it would be declined

We applied with Halifax last Friday afternoon, got a mortgage offer yesterday if that gives you an idea on Halifax turn arounds.

I bought 2 years ago so can’t help on specific timescales. But I had a decision in principle when I viewed, but when I made the full application that lender wouldn’t give a mortgage on the specific property I offered on. So it slowed the process down whilst I found an alternative mortgage company. Something to consider perhaps if there’s any reason why you think the offer might not be approved. (I didn’t think there would be any issues with mine - turned out to be flood related reasoning. Seller had bought the house cash so hadn’t had an issue herself so was a surprise all round when it came up)

Ours took 3 weeks as there was a lot of back and forward with the lender asking questions and wanting more documents.