As you may have seen already, if you check mortgages on Search engines like Google or Yahoo you’ll see there are 100’s of websites.

Many of these are run by mortgage brokers – small and large. Some, like this one, are independent.

Many will offer you the chance to make an enquiry about a mortgage.

But a major downside to making mortgage enquiries online has emerged as the internet has matured.

It’s not a problem simply making a relatively quick enquiry to get a mortgage broker to contact you – as you can do on this site.

However if you fill in a longer enquiry form on many of the lenders’ websites you are in effect going through the first stage of their application process. This means you are getting an “acceptance in principle” decision made by them.

The problem is that getting an “acceptance in principle” decision probably involves a credit search being made on you.

Every time you have a credit search done this is noted by the credit agencies, Experian and Equifax.

If you have more than 2 or 3 credit searches carried out on you in a short time scale this can start looking dodgy to the lenders.

They will ask themselves: Why are you making more applications? Does this mean you’ve been turned down? Ah ha… If you’ve been turned down by the competition then there must be something wrong with you…

… so goes the highly developed thinking.

While each lender has their own methods of credit scoring you, it appears that a common measurement used is if there’s evidence that you’ve been making a lot of applications this can adversely affect the credit score they judge you by.

To answer a common question we get: please don’t worry. Simply filling in our quick mortgage enquiry form does not involve an automatic credit score.

 

YOUR CHOICES: