Alan Lakey, partner of Highclere Financial Services, said he and his client had purposely started the remortgage process in October to avoid any delays in transferring the mortgage when his client was free of penalties from his original lender on 1 February.
Nationwide uses LMS for its conveyancing on its fees-free offer on remortgages and Lakey said that despite the mortgage offer being in place on 13 December, LMS had yet to arrange the redemption statement. He added that his client was so unimpressed by the service he had written a formal letter of complaint to LMS.
Lakey added: “The process has been scuppered by stupidity. What makes it particularly annoying is my client’s wife is a solicitor and could have done it for free. Everything is ready except the redemption statement and we know it’s covered because my client is raising money and there can’t be a shortfall.”
However, Dominic Toller, director of marketing and new business for LMS, said the firm had acted as quickly as it could, as the borrower had not returned necessary documents for a month and a half and requested data from the borrower had been missing until February.
He added: “This case demonstrates the complexities of the process of remortgaging from one lender to another. Our job is to link all the processes up and I believe we have done that very effectively. When we had all the documents we had requested, we asked for a redemption statement the same day and it took another eight days for it to be despatched from the lender, which it has. We have to wait until we have all the documents, as the redemption statement has to be up-to-date and the client would be charged every time a new one was requested.”
