Totally incompetent.
I would give L&C zero stars if possible. Our "mortgage expert", Amy, was completely incompetent. She made the whole process of buying our house 100x more stressful than it should have been.
This is long, so TL;DR: Amy at L&C made a catalogue of huge errors that nearly lost us the auction property we had bought, and the £16k deposit we'd put on it. Thankfully we gave up on L&C and found a broker who knew what he was doing in time to save it.
We contacted L&C to ask about the possibility of getting a mortgage to buy an auction property. Prior to the auction, we spoke to Amy 3 times. She put a mortgage in principle in place, and she was aware, at every stage, of the auction and completion dates. She was confident that it wouldn't be a problem. She also said that L&C could provide a solicitor for us, to streamline the buying process and hopefully reduce communication time, as the auction process has such a tight deadline.
Roll on the auction date, and we won! Yay! We immediately went back to Amy to start the process of getting a mortgage offer and she said "oh, because the timeline is so tight, I can't recommend getting a mortgage, you should apply for a bridging loan" and sent us off to a 3rd party bridging loan company. When we questioned why she had told us in the 3 conversations *before* the auction that it would be fine, she had no good answer, just ummed and ahhed.
We called the bridging loan company, who said that it wouldn't be possible to get a bridging loan with the LTV we needed. So we started panicking a bit, and went back to Amy and said we needed to try and get a mortgage. She agreed, and started the process. In the meantime, she sent our details to one of their solicitors.
The solicitor called us, and after a brief conversation it became clear that Amy had submitted the referral as a conventional sale, not an auction. The solicitor said very sorry, but they don't do auction properties. So back to Amy we went. She then said "oh no, none of our solicitors do auction properties, you'll have to find your own".
At this point, a week had passed. We found our own solicitor, and waited for the mortgage lender to do their valuation.
Amy got back to us nearly another week later saying that the mortgage had been denied. She gave us no other details, and didn't even try to resolve it, she just sent us back to the bridging loan company.
When we talked to them, they told us that the lender said the property was "uninhabitable" and needed £350k worth of work (we needed a £130k mortgage)... It definitely was *not* uninhabitable. We had a survey done before the auction, and it had nothing seriously wrong with it. We called our surveyor and they looked over the report they did for us and said they had no idea why the lender would have said that. We then called the bridging loan company again, who went to L&C on our behalf and managed to extract the lender's report from them... Which turned out to be for the WRONG PROPERTY. We bought a semi detached bungalow with oil heating, the report was talking about stairs needing to be replaced; front, back and "both side walls" needing to be knocked down and rebuilt, and that the gas needed "reconnecting". If Amy had bothered to do her job properly and checked the report she would have seen this.
At this point, we're 2 weeks away from the completion date and panicking. We gave up on L&C and went to a broker recommended by a friend. He had us a mortgage offer within a week, and between him and our amazing solicitor we just managed to meet the completion date, despite Amy's total incompetence.
ETA, after L&C's reply: I can't find where to respond to you with more details, however, my partner has received an email from L&C now, saying that the complaint is being investigated and that we will be kept updated about the outcome.
April 9, 2025
Unprompted review
