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Remo photos

ended 07. May 2026

This week, the client of a Newspage broker was asked by a major lender to take photos of their house for a remortgage (not a PT) in place of a survey (or possibly to accompany the lender’s AVM). The client’s existing mortgage is at a low LTV of 50% and they are switching from another high street lender.

Have you ever come across this practice before (on PTs and/or remortgages) and why do you think it is happening? To save the lender money on low risk remortgages? To streamline the Remo/PT? And are there risks too this process given we are in the age of AI when Frank’s house in Shameless could be made to look like a 5-bed townhouse in Pimlico? Any insights, send them across. We’ll be going to the lender in question to ask them for their views. But keen to know whether you’ve seen it before?

2 responses from the Newspage community

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Charles Hart
Business Principal at LionHart Mortgages & Protection
I'm all for lenders using creative thinking to improve and speed up the mortgage process for our clients, but you have to wonder whether this is a blind and shortsighted cost saving excercise by middle management, or a balanced approach to risk vs reward at low loan to value mortgages.

In a world where AI can make my modest 3 bed family home look like Buckingham Palace at the click of a button, and the amount of data and property sale history could boggle the mind, this seems to just make the lender look cheap and unprofessional, whilst also inconveniencing the client!
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Rohit Parmar-Mistry
Founder at Pattrn Data
Asking borrowers to photograph their homes may look like a harmless shortcut, especially on a low-LTV remortgage, but it changes where trust and liability sit in the process.

Lenders are clearly trying to cut cost and speed up low-risk cases, and that can be reasonable if the controls are clear. The problem is the age we are in: images can be incomplete, misunderstood, edited or generated. A faster valuation process still needs a way to spot when the evidence is weak.

This should be used carefully, not casually. If a lender replaces professional judgement with customer-supplied photos and automated checks, it needs a clear audit trail, escalation route and human review for anything unusual. Convenience is useful only when accountability survives it. For this brief, the useful answer is evidence people can check, limits they understand, and a clear route to challenge a poor outcome.