Legal Advisers and Introducers

Legal Advisers

Anyone applying for a mortgage or remortgage will normally use a legal adviser - usually a solicitor or a licensed conveyancer. It's their job to take care of all the legal work involved.

You will have to pay a fee for these services, as you are instructing the legal adviser to act for you. Your contract is with the legal adviser. Because of this, we cannot accept any responsibility for their work.

However, to make things easier and to speed up the mortgage process, we will usually ask the same legal adviser to act on our behalf as well - providing they are on our panel of approved legal advisors. If your advisor is not on our panel, then we will have to ask another legal adviser to deal with the mortgage and again, the cost of these legal fees will be met by you.

Introducers

Not everyone comes to us via one of our branches. Some people use introducers (or intermediaries), who recommend our mortgage products. Introducers can be solicitors, estate agents, financial advisers or other people connected with the housing market. These introducers have no direct connection with us, unless they are an appointed agent in which case you should be made aware of this.

If you have chosen to arrange your mortgage in this way, you should expect your introducer to give you the kind of guidance you would receive from us.

The introducer has to tell you if they are receiving a fee for arranging your mortgage and they should tell you the amount of that fee before you complete your mortgage.

If you decide to use an introducer, please bear in mind that we can not accept any responsibility for the advice you receive even if we pay a fee to that introducer. This applies to advice relating to which mortgage product is best for you and any advice you may be given about repaying your mortgage.