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Remortgage customers slipping onto SVRs due to Land Registry delays

Journalist: Paloma Kubiak, YourMoney.com

ended 28. March 2023

Good morning, 

Looking to hear experiences from brokers/professionals helping remortgage customers who are severely impacted by the Land Registry delays, ie those who've been told it will take 1-2 years to register and who have fallen onto a pricey SVR from a cheap fix in the meantime.

Are you seeing more cases of financially impacted customers because of the Land Registry delays?

Why do you think there are such big delays at Land Registry eg short of staff, covid after effect, strike action etc?

Is there anything you're telling customers to do to ride out the delays? Is there anything they can do?

Any real life calculations from client situations showing the monetary impact of the Land Registry delays eg borrower who had 2% fix now on a 7% SVR as they wait for registration?

Have you seen a spike in clients suffering as a result of the Land Registry delays? 

As well as broker impact, what's the impact on the lender/conveyancer?

Many thanks, Paloma

8 responses from the Newspage community

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Samuel Mather-Holgate
Independent Financial Adviser at Mather and Murray Financial
Many clients who purchased new build properties 2 years ago are now shocked to realise their properties have still not been registered with Land Registry due to delays with the service. This could impact them by not being able to remortgage to another lender, who requires this registration. 2 years ago, fixed rates could have been as low as 0.99% depending on the deposit offered, and if homeowners want to wait until their property is registered to remortgage this could mean moving onto a standard variable rate, many of which are 6.99% now. Not letting good be the enemy of perfect, most lenders will allow these homeowners to switch products with them so they can choose from a much more limited set of products. Real turmoil comes if the homeowners want to sell their property, and in most cases they can’t. They have to sit and wait. Land registry delays have been blamed on covid and lack of staff. Some have even murmured productivity amongst staff has collapsed since working from home.
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Justin Moy
Managing Director at EHF Mortgages
The delays at Land Registry have caused untold hassle, and costly higher rates for some time now, and the problem isn't easing either. For the majority of clients I woudl expect a Product Transfer product to be helpful, as most are price around the same as leading remortgage deals, but if you have a need to refinance elsewhere then this is not a good position to be in.
Many of the main mortgage lenders have a 'No-Early Repayment Charge' Tracker product, giving you a reasonable deal in the short term with the abilty to remortgage later in the year without any further penalties. Your mortgage broker will be able to check on your lenders' options, but if you are doing this 'DIY' now is the time to engage with some professional help.
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Emma Jones
Managing Director at Whenthebanksaysno.co.uk
It's time for the land registry to become more electronic as this would speed up the registering of these titles. Another failure from a government body impacts the general public. It is unreasonable to expect people to sit on SVR as well as manage the cost of living. If we left a client on SVR for 2 years we would be held accountable by the ombudsman. This should be the same.
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Riz Malik
Independent Financial Adviser at R3 Wealth
I have to say that the delays at the land registry, which seem out of place in the Chat GPT era, are completely fascinating to me. The effects of this old system have caused delays in my clients' efforts to refinance, so their lawyers have had to expedite their cases. It's time to fix up this old infrastructure and bring it into the 21st century with style.
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Kundan Bhaduri
Property Developer and Portfolio Landlord at The Kushman Group
I am not sure why there is so much fuss around HMLR! As someone that buys dozens of properties every year (and remortgages many of them within a year), I have close dealings with the HMLR all the time. On the contrary, I have found HMLR to be amongst the more professional government departments with an excellent customer service team. Agreed, HMLR has a massive backlog, but if one calmly explains the situation to them (eg: imminent remortgage or sale of a property), they will often ask for evidence and expedite the registration of title, making it a lot swifter. I am talking from experience having done this on dozens of cases. But please do not use this for frivolous cases, as it clogs up genuine expedition requests.
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Scott Taylor-Barr
Principal Adviser at Barnsdale Financial Management
Fortunately, this is something that has impacted very few of my clients. For those that have been affected I've been able to work with their conveyancer to use the Land Registry's fast track team, who can get properties registered or title documents amended in about 2 weeks, but only if the conveyancer has proof that not using the fast-track process will have a detrimental outcome for the client. So far, it's worked well and allowed clients to avoid costly delays caused by the backlog, but it is a sticking plaster solution, the government needs to get a handle on the situation and fix the problem properly.
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Gary Boakes
Director at Verve Financial
2 years ago, I helped a lovely couple buy their first property with HTB, unfortunately, due to a few credit issues we had to use Precise. 2 years later- great news, credit all improved and we started a remortgage with Natwest 5 months ago, giving us plenty of time for do the remortgage even with HTB included. Due to the land registry issues, we are now on a Precise SVR of 7.5%, but only we have had to get the old solicitor involved and the stress on my customer has been terrible. Land registry is now back but now have 6-8 weeks to wait for the help to buy.
THe delays are shocking and costing customers money and options.
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Gary Bush
Financial Adviser at MortgageShop.com
It's good to see the Land Registry delays getting some coverage - the situation is beyond a joke. The big worry for us is that the problems that Land Registry are having is a bit of a black hole, there simply aren't any explanations coming back that make any sense. Most parts of the property and financial world post Covid have improved their working arrangements, sadly the government part of this situation, Land Registry, has gone backwards in this time and are producing very unreasonable outcomes compared to other segments of the process. For new build homes to not be registered when clients initial 2 year fixes come to an end beggars belief and the Housing Minister needs to setup a review of this situation, it's causing a number of consumers to revert to the lender's variable rate - when ideally we should have been able to move them straight onto another fixed rate deal.