The mortgage adviser who lives round here.

Why Surrey cases are their own thing

Prices here do most of the work. A deposit that would be comfortable in much of the country is a modest percentage against a Guildford or Woking valuation, and percentage is what lenders price against — not the amount saved. People arrive assuming they have a healthy deposit and discover it puts them in a band they did not expect.

The income picture is different too. A lot of Surrey borrowers are commuters, contractors, company directors or people whose pay arrives as a modest salary plus something much larger once a year. None of that is a problem in itself. It is a problem when it meets a lender whose affordability model assumes twelve equal months.

Put those together with something on a credit file and you have a case that high-street lenders may decline without ever explaining why — and the reason is rarely the credit event on its own.

Where a specialist fits in Surrey

There are good brokers here, with genuine local standing and years behind them, and for a straightforward case any of them will do a perfectly good job — often faster than I will, because a clean file does not need the research mine do.

Most Surrey business is straightforward, so most Surrey brokers are generalists. Difficult credit is a narrower trade: CCJs, defaults, an IVA that has completed versus one still running, income that arrives once a year. That is the part I have spent more than twenty years on, and it is the only reason to ring me rather than someone round the corner.

What I would rather you did before ringing anyone

• Get your actual credit file, not a score. A number out of 999 tells a lender nothing. Dates, amounts and whether things are marked satisfied are what decide this.
• Write down what happened and roughly when. Age matters more than size, and people routinely misremember a default as more recent than it is.
• Do not apply again to see what happens. Each attempt leaves a footprint and a cluster of them makes the next lender warier.

When most of the money arrives once a year

This is the Surrey case I see more than any other. A household where the salary is perfectly respectable and the salary is not really the point — the bonus is, or the commission, or the share award, or the day rate invoiced through a limited company. Everyone in the house knows what the year is worth. The difficulty is that lenders do not agree with each other about it.

A discretionary bonus is treated very differently from a contractual one. Some lenders will consider a proportion of it, some average it across two years, some want a track record before they count it at all, and a first strong year frequently counts for very little. Share awards are often disregarded entirely, however real the money was. And a contractor can be read as a day rate multiplied out across the year by one lender and as a limited company needing two years of accounts by another — which produces borrowing figures thousands apart from identical paperwork.

None of this is exotic. It is ordinary Surrey pay meeting affordability models built around twelve equal months. Knowing which lender reads your particular shape of income generously is most of the work, and it is worth establishing before an application rather than after a decline.

Older houses, bigger gardens, odder titles

The other half of it is the property. Surrey has a great deal of stock that is nothing like a modern estate house, and each quirk narrows the field of lenders willing to lend on it — entirely regardless of how good the applicant is.

• Period and listed buildings. Common around Farnham, Godalming and the villages. Listing brings restrictions, and some lenders simply step back from it.
• Thatch, timber frame and other non-standard construction. A smaller pool of lenders, and often specialist buildings insurance that has to be arranged before exchange rather than in the final week.
• Flying freehold. Part of one property sitting over another, which old village terraces produce constantly. Several lenders limit how much of the building may be affected.
• Land. A paddock, stables or a few acres can move a house out of the ordinary residential category and into something assessed quite differently.
• Annexes and outbuildings with their own facilities. Fine for many lenders, a complication for others, and worth knowing which before an offer is expected.

The useful part is that all of it is knowable in advance. A conveyancer raising a flying freehold three weeks in is a delay; the same fact established before the application simply changes which lender we approach.

Where I actually work

Guildford, Woking, Godalming, Farnham, Camberley and the villages between them — and Stockley Park at the other end, which is how I know both the Surrey and the West London sides of the same commute. Most advice happens by phone and video regardless; the geography matters less than people expect. It is simply easier to say yes to a seven o'clock call when it is fifteen minutes from home.