Marsden Building Society enhances expat mortgage criteria

Marsden Building Society has announced a number of changes to its expat mortgage criteria, designed to offer greater flexibility and a smoother process for intermediaries.

Expat Buy to Let criteria changes

The Society has simplified its Expat Buy to Let criteria by:

• Removing the minimum income requirement.
• Reducing documentation requirements for employed and self-employed applicants - for example, self-employed applicants now only require one year of accounts (two years if top slicing) and employed applicants just require their most recent payslip.
• Removing the mandatory employer's reference requirement for Buy to Let cases.

These changes are designed to streamline the application process while maintaining the Society's common-sense underwriting approach.

Greater flexibility on country eligibility

The Marsden has removed its Country Exclusions list and will review expat cases based on real time data from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), enabling a more flexible approach to expat lending.

As part of the update, the Society will not accept applications from customers residing in, or with financial links to, countries on the FATF High-Risk and Increased Monitoring (Black and Grey) Lists, available at www.fatf-gafi.org (External).

Applications are also not accepted from customers residing in EU/EEA countries, due to the absence of service agreements, or from residents of Australia due to legislative restrictions.

Simplified additional borrowing process

Requirements for additional borrowing requests have been simplified across the Society’s entire mortgage portfolio, making applications easier to submit. Intermediaries should refer to the latest documentation checklists for further information.

Jo Cave, Head of Mortgages at Marsden Building Society, said: "These changes demonstrate our ongoing commitment to supporting intermediaries with flexible lending solutions and straightforward processes. We've listened to broker feedback and taken steps to reduce unnecessary administration, making it easier to submit and place expat cases with us.

"Combined with our manual underwriting approach, these enhancements give brokers greater flexibility and more opportunities to meet the needs of their expat clients."

These latest updates reflect Marsden's ongoing commitment to working with its intermediary partners to find practical solutions to complex cases.