I have used John Charcol for many years sorting mortgages for myself and my companies. Until now I have never had any issues but this contact has been so dreadful and expensive that I cannot believe it was with the same firm. I was trying to arrange to port my son and daughter’s NatWest mortgage onto a new property for them. It should have been very simple but John Charcol had sorted the original mortgage so I thought it better to let them do it. We were looking for an increase as well as the original sum as is normal in the circumstances. I explained the position to broker Dan Watkins, he asked for the supporting documents, my daughter is self-employed and son, sadly, is permanently disabled so survives on benefits. Everything was emailed over. A couple of days later Dan comes back with great news – “We’d be able to achieve borrowing capacity of £304,000 taking into account the benefits and the last 2 year average income from self-employment. This is assuming there is no ongoing debts or commitments.” I confirmed there were no debts or commitments and checked that the mortgage was NatWest ported, which Dan confirms. Great! Dan wishes us luck house hunting! – “Thanks and best of luck with the property search.” We went house hunting, with the mortgage sum being £10K more than we expected it was good when we found a suitable house and had an offer accepted on it. We had had an offer on our existing house, a cheeky £25,000 below the asking price but the agents were confident they would push it up a bit. Purple bricks started to push us for proof of money, I sent the email from John Charcol and the estate agent confirmed the offer on our property – all fine. Purple bricks came back asking for an AIP from NatWest not an email from John Charcol. I emailed Dan asking him to get one, he said it would take a couple of days. After four days with no news I called him but got an answerphone twice. I called the main switchboard, was told Dan was on holiday! I was put through to Daniel Harris. He was great, he looked at the file, no AIP had been received from NatWest but he said that the figures all looked fine and that Dan had committed John Charcol to getting us a mortgage so he would send me a John Charcol AIP which he stated, “Purple Bricks would be happy with since JC never failed to honour an AIP.” We discussed what would happen if NatWest came back with a lower figure and Daniel explained that they had loads of borrowers that would easily cover the £304,000 and the early settlement penalty, £6,000 from NatWest. He repeated that JC never breaks a commitment. The AIP arrived from JC and I sent it to PurpleBricks who immediately confirmed it was fine. My daughter was concerned that we could lose the house if someone else made and offer so we finalised it and told our agents to agree to the £400,000 offer on our property so we could get the legal teams in action. We were using the same lawyers we had used previously and told them to get on with it. We had a small party, we had apparently bought the house we wanted. Then PurpleBricks came back saying they needed a bank AIP, I think the JC one just didn’t match a tick box on their check list but I chased Dan again, his reply took the ground out from under our feet! “Sorry to hear there’s issues with our Certificate. The case was originally referred to NatWest and we had to wait a while for a response on this. In the meantime I believe this certificate was provided to you. We have had a response back from NatWest and they have stated the maximum amount of borrowing allowed would be £258,200 after review of the application as a whole. We are now falling short of the amount required so I’m not sure how you would like to proceed at this stage.” NatWest had come back £45,000 less than Dan had stated initially. I replied reiterating Daniel’s comments, Dan said he would talk to Daniel to see what was agreed. Dan came back with an email that shocked us, “I’m very sorry for the miscommunication from Daniel, he provided this without checking the referral details with NatWest which were still pending; he has now left the business. We should not be providing AIP certificates without finalising checks first and I appreciate that it has caused you a lot of inconvenience for you all.” It was Dan that committed JC to the £304,000 by his statement – “We’d be able to achieve borrowing capacity of £304,000” Daniel just followed his lead after looking at his figures! John Charcol refuse to honour their commitment made by Dan or the AIP issued in Dan’s name by Daniel. There was no reason for us to doubt that the £304,000 was correct when we received the AIP. We accepted an offer for £400,000 for our house on the basis that the £304,000 would allow us to complete the deal on buying our new house. That now comes back to bite us, that buyer has gone elsewhere since we haven’t got a house to buy leaving the chain incomplete and other viewers all offer £400,000 to match the last accepted but incomplete sale price, social media means there are no secrets! There is little chance we will attain the £425,000 price that the estate agents believe is the actual valuation of the house now so we have lost £25,000 and have little or no chance of ever completing on the purchase of our house. John Charcol have seriously messed up and will not even talk to u about it, we just get rubbish replies, the initial line from Dan was a ‘GUIDE’ based on his use of the NatWest Calculator but that was never stated nor were we warned when he wished us good luck house hunting! The AIP is effectively a PROMISE to get that mortgage if nothing has changed, we didn’t have time to change anything! It appears John Charcol are now employing low grade staff who take shortcuts and rely on being bailed out by their seniors but issuing a false AIP gets you fired showing just how serious it is . Will anybody ever accept a John Charcol commitment or AIP after the way they behaved here?