With a commonsense approach to portfolio cases, West One offer a safe pair of hands to help landlords maintain and grow their portfolio, by delivering finance in a smooth and timely fashion. This case study highlights how our individual approach to underwriting enabled us to successfully support a landlord to expand their portfolio.
The applicant is a portfolio landlord with 10 properties in his portfolio. Aside from his property portfolio, he earns a gross annual salary of £12,400 as a sole trader in the music industry. The client has historic mortgage arrears from 2018 and rents their residential property.
The client was looking to expand their portfolio and purchase a 3-bed terraced house that was currently owned by a family member for £150k. The client already had 4 high street mortgages and over £1m in lending with another lender.
Unlike traditional high-street mortgage lenders, West One were able to get comfortable with the lender's situation. We look for the background portfolio to be at 100% rental cover, meaning we can focus on the property in question. The LTV was less than 70% on the background portfolio and the rental income would be 258% of the mortgage payments.
While some lenders will refuse to lend to an applicant that resides in a rental property, our commonsense approach meant that we were comfortable with the mortgage history from the applicant's portfolio and his proof of rent payments. In addition, we didn't require proof of income from the client as the DSCR was 168.14%.
At West One, all our cases are manually underwritten which means our team of experts will assess the risk of the case on an individual basis. In this case, despite there being historic mortgage arrears, as they had not taken place during the last 3 years, we did not need to take these into account and were able to proceed under our W1 product range.
Our commonsense approach to portfolio landlords meant that we were able to offer the client the required funds to complete the purchase and support the growth of the client. The borrower was delighted with the outcome and the fast and flexible service that West One delivered.
'Having not used West One previously I was unsure of how pragmatic the approach would be when looking at the client's situation, however, I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly they were to be able to come back to me with a decision.'