Its two-year discount remortgage is one of the few fee-free deals that does not contain hidden charges.
It offers borrowers a discount of 1.05% off Standard Variable Rate for two years, loans up to 80% loan-to-value, no arrangement fee, no application fee, legal fees paid or £250 cashback, and no compulsory insurance. Redemption penalties only apply during the discount period.
The society points to a number of products offered by other lenders, clearly targeted at remortgages, that offer to pay the borrower’s legal and/or surveying costs, but apply charges that are added to the loan at completion. Most of these charges outweigh the savings made by free legal and surveying costs.
Such charges are particularly heavy for remortgages given the relatively low administrative costs of such deals.
Paul Winter, Sales and Marketing Director of Ipswich Building Society, said: “Our new fee-free product is precisely what it claims to be - totally fee-free. This is something that cannot be said about a lot of the other ‘fee-free’ products. Consumers could have a £100,000 ‘fee-free’ mortgage with some lenders and end up paying charges equivalent to an extra half percent on the interest rate in the first year.”
Mr Winter added: “Our new product has no smoke-and-mirror devices. It is a genuinely fee-free product at a low interest rate.”
Three per cent of the original advance is charged if the loan is redeemed or reduced to less than half its original value within the discounted period.
