According to Alan Lakey, senior partner at Highclere Financial Services, these mix and match options, where a borrower ports across their existing deal, are hard to process due to the inability of various sourcing systems to comprehend the workings of the deal.
He said: “I have a client that last year obtained a three-year fixed mortgage with the Portman. Now after a year he wants to move, and rather than pay hefty penalties he is sticking with Portman, which is happy to lend him the extra money.
“However it is impossible to source anything like this because sourcing systems seem unable to port across existing deals. In the end the only feasible way to get around it is to apply to the lender directly to get a KFI but this takes a lot of time.”
“Any situation that needs a porting across of funds seems impossible for sourcing systems to do,” Lakey added.
Ken Sives, senior partner at Sives Financial Services, also told of his troubles with the systems. He said: “It seems that the problem is across the board. I had the same difficulty where, rather than incur massive penalties, the client moving house stuck with the lender.
“It was hard to process through a sourcing system and in the end I had to go directly to the lender. The sourcing systems are just not capable of doing what we want them to do.”
However, Mortgage Brain’s chief executive Mark Lofthouse responded by arguing that although no sourcing systems have the ability to undertake mortgage porting, further advances are available.
He said: “When porting is required the best course of action is to go back to the lender. Sourcing systems do however provide the option of quoting for any further advances but only on the products that are available at the time.”
