We did an article on the 21st of February about online mortgages, this is just a very brief follow up because we got a few mails about it.

So far we don’t know of any brokerage or lender offering a purely 100% online mortgage, there is a good deal of work that can be done via the Internet but there is not a fully Internet based solution out there right now. By an online mortgage the assumption is that there are no phone calls or emails or anything done that require interaction with another human being. An Irish mortgage online will be a reality at some stage in the future, and hopefully we will be the group pioneering them but currently because of money laundering requirements and the complexity of mortgages a mortgage online is not possible, at least in the sense described above.

What is the closest thing to mortgages online? At the moment sending in documentation and then talking to a human at some point is the nearest working solution. In an ideal world you could automate almost everything including the mortgage consultation, an online mortgage would be fairly handy if that were to happen, and technically a mortgage broker or provider could probably come up with the necessary algorithm to create a consultation of generic advice that works depending on the answers you give, basically you would go through different videos based on a flow-chart on the back end.

from that point it would be up to the client to take care of everything including the organisation of documenation etc. This could be achieved using scanning points in various solicitors offices around the country perhaps? Or if the lenders would accept it the client could scan the documents themselves, or they could post all of the originals by registered post?

That part would be simple enough, the issue with an online mortgage would begin when it gets to the banks underwriters, for the sake of this article you can think of them as guard dogs, they make sure no money gets out unless it passes all the criteria a bank has. Simply put, every mortgage has the same result, money changes hands and interest is paid, but getting to that point is always different. The closest analogy is that many people have a job but they don’t all get them via the same route nor is the lead up to them all identical.

We are always open to any suggestions as to how an mortgage via the Internet could be achieved but thus far online mortgages – primarily because of lender/bank requirements more than any broker requirements- will not be a reality for another few years.