WFH turned my mortgage application into a nightmare

When I started out as a buy-tolet investor, getting a mortgage was easier than buying a pint of milk. They were heady, dizzying days and it seems crazy now when I think back to how things were. You could buy a property in the morning and remortgage it in the afternoon for more money.

Obviously, such insanity could not last – which was one of the reasons why we had the financial crisis.

After a decade that has seen a heap of regulations to tighten up such farcical behaviour, we are now in a new era of lending when banks apparently want to lend (and the Government is begging them to), but seemingly not without knowing your blood group, previous sexual partners and what your mother had for breakfast.

Two months ago I started a mortgage application for a property that has been in my portfolio for 10 years. It is owned in a company with a small mortgage and the five-year fixed-rate deal was expiring. I called up the current lender and asked it what my new rate would be.

Its response surprised me. It said it could not give me any details as it dealt only with brokers. My protestations that I was a current client and didn’t want any additional borrowing, just a product-switch option, fell on deaf ears.

Go to a broker, they said. I did, and the broker found me a better-priced deal. And so the remortgage debacle began.

I have previously dealt with this lender and it knows I have a clean track record. But to assist the bank in its decision I have had to provide not only the past three months’ personal bank statements but also my personal property portfolio, my credit report ( the fully comprehensive one, from three different agencies), my personal spending, my tax-year overviews, my SA302s and now my SA100s (this is my full tax return).

Over the past two months I have been quizzed about my personal spending (what has my Netflix subscription got to do with this?), asked to provide a detailed history as to how I obtained the wealth to build the portfolio ( 20 years of hard graft!) and why my husband changed jobs last year. The level of inanity was mind-boggling.

This is the result of post-pandemic-but-still-working-from-home lending decisions.

Dom Sheahan of The Mortgage Branch, a broker, said: “What’s happened is that usually an underwriting team would be in an open-plan office, all helping each other.

“Now they’re all sitting at home in their underpants, not wanting to WhatsApp Dave, the team leader, so just ask for another document just in case.”

That is the reason why such crazy, inane questions are being levelled at anyone who is trying to get a mortgage. Knowing this doesn’t make my life any easier, but at least I can now understand why this level of detail is being requested. Obviously, the image of a mansplaining, underpants-wearing (hopefully) underwriter too scared to text the boss is not something I wish to conjure up too often, but it has enabled me to have a bit more patience with this ridiculously drawn-out process.

I was asked to provide a detailed history of how I created my portfolio (20 years of hard graft!)

The Secret Landlord is written by an anonymous buy-to-let investor. Write to her at secretlandlord@telegraph.co.uk