Saffron Building Society Anmeldelser 218

Despite us, the sellers, our surveyor, Zoopla, the estate agents all agreeing on the value of the house we were buying, they undervalued it by £25k. We provide all the documents upfront and were given our agreement in principle. When it came to the mortgage offer, they had dropped the LTV by 10% and undervalued the house leaving us with a mark on our credit reports and a £65k funding gap for no apparent reason. Honestly don't waste your time applying for a mortgage with them, they will do what they can to ensure you won't get one.

Thanks to said to last moment to you lending the money and when you need to pay cancel my

Got an excitable e-mail from the CEO of the Society today to say that the interest rate on my account had reached the dizzy heights of 1.5%. With food inflation at 20%. Wha planet are these people on?

Saffron asked for ever more documentation, statements and forms for a mortgage application. Approaching 50 different PDF files submitted. Maybe more, I stopped counting. Then, ~2 months after the original application, they asked for everything again for the 'last 3 months'. I didn't bother. You shouldn't either.

This is a long review - so here’s a summary in case you don’t want to read the whole thing: high fees; very slow; pedantic; incompetent; hugely risk averse; and failed to complete on time. They took over five months to complete our simple remortgage.

We eagerly selected Saffron based on a very good rate for a five year fix RIO (Retirement Interest Only) mortgage, but here are the things that we wish we had known five months ago. Our status is that we have recently completed on a mortgage with Saffron - but that is more a measure of our persistence than anything positive about Saffron. There were many times, had the rate of this offer not been so low (while rates were rising), that we would have ditched them and gone to a ‘proper’ lender.

Fees
We were aware of most of the fees involved when we first applied for this mortgage, but not all of them. Our fees are set out below. The last item, in particular, is a ridiculous waste of money (more of this later). The valuation fee is also worth mentioning. Saffron insisted on a full valuation of the property, despite there being ample evidence of the property’s worth, and a LTV ratio of around only 11%. Ie: there was no risk to Saffron had the property been worth only a quarter of what it last changed hands for.

In total these fees increase the effective rate of our mortgage by 1.2% over the period of the fix. My conclusion is that Saffron places little value on, and is frivolous with, its clients’ money.

TOTAL fees of approximately £4,500 - including the following items:
Valuation fee £780
Broker’s fee (Saffron requires that you use a broker) £995
Solicitor’s fees for independent legal advice £840

Speed
Saffron has defined ’service levels’ for responding to communications and processing applications. However, it seems that rather than these service levels being the MAXIMUM period Saffron requires to respond, they reflect the period that Saffron ALWAYS takes to respond. Never, in our experience, were Saffron any quicker than the defined service level. In particular once they have all of the necessary information, they required 24 working days for the underwriting department to come up with a decision. Seriously? These days?

Pedantry
Saffron have a liking for hard copy documentation including bank statements. We had all sorts of issues getting bank statements in a format that they would accept. So if you bank with a purely online bank, that doesn’t do hard copy statements, I don’t know how you will satisfy their exacting standards of authenticity.

Incompetent
I have lost count of the number of times that documents had to be sent, and then re-sent to Saffron because they claimed not to have them. For instance, to my certain knowledge, they were sent our Powers of Attorney three times before they acknowledged they had them.

Legal Advice
Saffron’s extreme risk aversion is what drove the most annoying and unnecessary part of our encounter - the requirement that my wife and I each had to take independent legal advice. That is advice independent of EACH OTHER as well as independent of our conveyancing solicitor. We had selected the conveyancing solicitor from Saffron’s approved list on the understanding that they would be able to act for both parties as a one-stop-shop and meet all of Saffron’s requirements - and save costs. Apparently not!

Anyway, this requirement, is the most over-engineered and patronising thing I have ever encountered. We are both perfectly capable of reading the mortgage deed for ourselves. But most painful of all, was the fact that we were forced to pay for this utterly futile advice, and as expected, this process added no value whatsoever and told us nothing that we didn’t already know.

Late Completion
Our conveyancing solicitor submitted the final documents required, in ample time, such that completion would take place on 22 December: Only to be told on the 22 December, after being repeatedly chased by our solicitor, that Saffron was unable to release funds prior to the new year. Frankly, by this stage, this was no more than I had expected - I would have been surprised if completion had happened on time. Completion finally took place on 10 January.

This failure to complete didn’t particularly matter to us - it’s a remortgage and we weren’t desperate for the cash. But what if we hadn’t been in this fortunate position, or we were moving house? We might have ended up in default, or a transaction chain might have collapsed. You couldn’t trust Saffron with any transaction which is time-critical, and it would be foolhardy to attempt to do so.

I hope that this cautionary tale makes you think twice about selecting Saffron as your lender.

I save with them; small saver so admittedly not millions, but a very competitive rate. Reason I am writing a review is simply to applaud their Customer Services team on the phone, who were polite, helpful, friendly, knowledgeable, sounded like they cared, and overall a joy to deal with. Nicola was the first person I spoke to and I am so sorry to the second whose name I didn't catch.

After waiting weeks and weeks and sending endless amounts of paperwork and documents, we were rejected at the final stage today leaving a chain of buyers/sellers frustrated.

To be rejected on a car finance is ridiculous, my wage alone covers the mortgage payments plus extra and my partners wage is quadruple plus extra of what my wage is and we have no dependents.

I cannot believe we have wasted so much time waiting around for this company when we could have gone elsewhere and have now lost our dream house as its just all taken far too long that the sellers want to put it back on the market.

DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME GETTING A MORTGAGE WITH THIS COMPANY❗️❗️❗️❗️
If I could rate 0 I definitely would. I was 99% ready for the big move, almost packed my house up! Had DIP and the go ahead. Paid solicitors, mortgage advisor ect... for them to pull out last minute. I feel as though they are very unreasonable and definitely not very professional in the way they deal with customers. I feel very disheartened, disappointed and over all annoyed with the whole situation. My review hopefully can help you get an idea of the kind of company you're dealing with.

I love my building society. I've been with them since 2016 and have recommended them to my friends ever since.

It took me years to find a lender who I feel actually treats you as an individual. I don't think I'll ever have to go anywhere else for a mortgage.

I recently opened an online regular saver with Saffron BS and have been most impressed with their speedy service. I rang this morning as I had accidently made the same payment into my account twice and I got straight through to a very helpful woman who told me that the second payment will be returned to my nominated bank account by the end of today. A very competitive savings rate of 2% for depositing £50/month is offered and is certainly more than many of the bigger banks and building societies offer. Keep up the great work.

Dreadful. I setup a savings account for my son last year, attracted by the good savings rate. However, when it comes to withdrawing the money they will only provide a cheque. I'm sure this can only have been done deliberately to make it difficult to withdraw the money. The new savings account I have setup for him will not accept cheques and I am unable to pay it into my own account. This has caused a lot of trouble and I'm still not able to access the money.

Worst bank every . Never use them again

Absolutely dreadful. They accepted my application for an expat mortgage and happily took my application fee and then the survey fee. Only after completing the survey did they then turn round and say I needed a UK income - for an EXPAT mortgage! Promised to refund all my fees and then only refunded part of the fees. Is this even legal?? Avoid at all costs.

Brilliant service in dealing with bereavement. They called to let us know how things were progressing and dealt with everything in 10 working days. High standard professional service and didn’t have the unnecessary bureaucracy of the high street banks.

I will be honest, if I could rate less than 1 I would. I am a first time buyer and have been trying to buy for quite some time. I understand that due to covid things take a little longer, but to wait 3 MONTHS to get an answer is a little too much on the ridiculous side for me. Not only that to then hear that the mortgage has been rejected due to the property being on a main road (is that not 90% of houses in this country) it’s just appalling and disgusting to be honest. Don’t even think about going to this bank for a mortgage a waste of time and now the whole sale might fall through. -10 out of 5 for me.

I applied for BTL , after lot of document asking from this lender at various stages after 6 weeks they felt my portfolio is growing too fast and they decided not lend. How shame is on under writer wasting so much of time and valuation fee come to this decision. I secured mortgage from Paragon who is happy to lend for the same property. Never in life again with this lender as I felt they are Time Wasters and nuisance for the business as well.

I had the most irresponsible response ever from Saffron this morning following my application to open an instant access esavings account. For some unknown reason, they could not validate my nominated bank account. Odd, bearing in mind I have banked with Nationwide for over 25 years, but ok, I have recently moved house. I wanted to deposit the proceeds, as I was due to be in rental for around a year or so. However, I was requested to supply Saffron with a copy of my bank statement, by either popping in to a Saffron branch, or by getting it certified, which would entail obtaining the signature of an approved individual, who would clarify that yes, the bank statement was mine. All for 0.5% interest rate online! Both options involved both disproportionate effort, or risk to health due to the inadequacies of their systems. So I stuck it in a Hargreaves Lansdown active savings Account, and recommend you all do the same. For a few quid every £100,000 it isn’t worth the effort. I did have more than that to invest, but obviously they don’t need the business 😂.

No point working with this company, you will not get anything from them. The company gave me a deadline to submit documents in order to get a mortgage from them. As the deadline approached, they made sure they were unavailable to take phone calls or even answer emails and then they said that I had missed the deadine. A complete and utter waste of time and effort dealing with these shady operators.

Worst company I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with. Applied for a mortgage, was approved in principle but seller pulled out. Because I had approval in principle, I found another property and put an offer in. Saffron would not honour the AIP and did a whole new application and wanted all fees again. Took weeks to get AIP again but valuation was then declined because the flat that I wanted to buy was near arcades, pubs and shops. Now back to the drawing board after weeks of being messed around. Would not have even given 1 star for Saffron but couldn't add review without 1. Awful, awful mortgage lender!

Tried to open a savings account online. After one month I telephoned their customer services and was told they have my application and they would respond soon. Another month goes by and I still haven’t heard from Saffron Walden. I contact customer services again who now can’t find my application. I was advised to open the account at a branch. I go to the branch with my identification etc., and apply for the account. I was told I should get a letter advising of my account number in the next few days. Two weeks later I still haven’t had a letter so I contact customer services who advised my application had been refused. They said they don’t have to give a reason. To say I am appalled by the very poor service is an understatement. I would never recommend this building society.