Phil Perry, director of ARK Financial Planning Limited, argued that as a client of his had a varied employment history due to his line of work it was almost impossible to find a product for him.
He said: “I have a client who works on a contractual basis through an agency. He gets paid through the agency rather than through his employer direct. When it came to sourcing his mortgage, it proved very difficult because he was unable to prove his employment history over the past 18 months because he has been in and out of jobs due to the nature of his work.
“When sourcing the application the only one I could find was a Platform deal, although there could be more. It requires a 12-month employment history which is a lot easier for my client to provide than an 18-month backlog of jobs.”
Perry went on to add that sourcing systems should be more diverse due to a growing range of product offerings. He said: “As a mortgage adviser the fees we get paid for sorting through the mortgages is not enough and, despite sourcing systems helping our cause, we still have to do an awful lot of digging around and extra work before and during the mortgage application.”
However, Kim Barrett, proprietor at KS Barrett & Associates, said that it is up to the broker to shop around for a deal. “As with any lender the LTV that the client asks for is a concern the higher it goes. For someone who has no set job schedule and is constantly changing jobs then this could be a problem but the broker should be able to adequately source a client like this through self-cert or through other means,” he argued.
