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Are you fed up of waiting weeks and weeks for your mortgage / loan to complete?
It is not uncommon to find that, once your mortgage offer is issued, it can still take months for completion to actually take place. This is often down to the delays faced during the legal stage by the acting solicitors. Whether it be waiting for local searches to come back (which we find is always one of the main things that slows transactions down), struggling to locate the associated documents to a property’s title or even having to review planning approvals from many years prior to check the subject property meets regulations, all of these things can take time.
Even for someone that has owned a property for a long period of time, some of the questions raised can be very time consuming to find the right answers to, not to mention the back and forth with solicitors on the answers given.
However, if you are remortgaging a property (rather than it being a new purchase) a lot of these issues, if not all, can be covered by an indemnity policy known as Title Insurance, which avoids the need for all of the above queries to be looked into and satisfied.
What is Lender Title Insurance and how does it work?
Title Insurance is an indemnity policy that covers for a lot of the legal enquiries that solicitors request for, which can take a lot of time to satisfy, one notably being the need for local authority searches which can typically take 4-5 weeks to come back. Other things such as sight of building regulation sign off and planning permissions can also be covered, as well as any potential defects with the property’s land registry title deeds.
The lender works on the basis that, when the client first purchased the property a full title investigation was completed, so any serious defects would have been outlined during the initial purchasing stage. The Title Insurance then covers the lender for any of these issues arising that could end up effecting their loan.
Title Insurance is a lender only protection, because the client should have been made aware of any issues when originally purchasing the property and have their own cover in place where necessary.
There is no restriction to the loan size. Advocate Finance have been able to complete on £1 million+ loan sizes within 2 weeks of the mortgage offer being issued, thanks to the use of title insurance. In some instances you can find these cases complete quicker than a bridging loan.
Just to re-iterate, this quick title insurance service only applies to remortgage cases.
How can Title Insurance speed up the process?
There are certain lenders in the market that are able to use an indemnity policy called title insurance during the legal stage, which can mean completion takes place within as little as 1-2 weeks. Using these lenders can reduce application to completion times from potentially up to 12 weeks, right down to as little as 4 weeks.
Does Title Insurance cost a lot of money to be put in place?
Given how beneficial and effective it can be when it comes to speed, you would think it might cost a fortune but that is not the case. Just to give you an idea – see below the cost for some of our recent deals that completed using title insurance.
- Property value of £650,000 / 75% loan to value / HMO / Title Insurance cost = £311
- Property value of £1,230,000 / 75% loan to value / Semi-Commercial / Title Insurance cost = £565
- Property value of £350,000 / 75% loan to value / Residential / Title Insurance cost = £116
All of the above were able to complete within 10 working days of the mortgage offer being signed.
How can Advocate Finance help?
We are investment property experts here at Advocate Finance. Do you require finance on your existing property within a matter of weeks ? Whether it is a residential, semi-commercial or a fully commercial asset – please contact me and I will do my best to find a solution for you!
As always, we assess each case on it’s own merits tailoring a solution to your individual needs.
We provide a FREE assessment on all our services.
Please contact me directly for more information, or use the Get in Touch With Us Today feature at the bottom of this page.
