Going on site for your mortgage

Homebuyers hunting for a mortgage online were given a boost this week following the announcement that John Charcol, the mortgage broker, is set to launch a website that can present a range of mortgage offers and process an application in one visit.

The charcolonline.co.uk site claims to allow users to search through 300 products from the 25 top lenders, including Standard Life, Egg, Abbey National, Woolwich and Nationwide along with a range of the broker's branded mortgage offers.

Visitors to the site can fill in a cut-down version of the standard mortgage application form the broker says has been agreed with lenders.

A company spokesman says it will take about two days to run a series of credit checks before the application can be cleared, which is a huge improvement on the current processing time of up to two weeks.

A `rapid re-mortgage'' service is committed to turning round a mortgage application in 24 hours.

John Charcol usually charges a fee of about ?250 for its service provided over the telephone and from high street shops. The net service, which leaves visitors to make up their own mind which type of mortgage best suits their needs, will be free.

The firm says the service will go live from today and will be open night and day. If it sticks to this commitment, the site could beat its nearest rival - emfinance.com - to the punch.

Emfinance is the retail arm of the eXchange, an internet financial services company that floated on the stock exchange in August. It claims to go several steps beyond the Charcol scheme.

Marketing director Kevin Friend says the site will work quickly enough to turn around a mortgage application in 20 minutes rather than two days. It will also allow homebuyers to track the conveyancing process using a password to see if searches and surveys have been carried out, saving them the hassle of ringing solicitors or the building society.

Emfinance publicised the advent of its service a couple of weeks ago, but since then has suffered a major glitch that has prevented consumers from seeing anything other than a lifeless, inactive homepage.

Mr Friend says development of the site ground to a halt after the telecoms network it uses in Scotland collapsed last week under the welter of telephone calls that followed the announcement of tickets for the England v Scotland games.

The site is now scheduled to go live next week, but Mr Friend was unable to give a firm date.

As a result, from this weekend the John Charcol site will join the only existing web operation that claims to offer a full internet service. Independent Mortgage Brokers (www.mortgage-brokers.co.uk) is a Kent-based outfit that has run its own web service for almost two years. Homebuyers can log on to the site and view a range of products and thus begin the process of applying for a mortgage online.

More sophisticated tools such as online tracking are so far absent. More surprisingly the mortgage products in the best buy tables are not listed next to the lender's name. In fact it is not until the mortgage application is begun that consumers know who they are signing up with.

A spokesman for the broker said the website had been designed to promote the best buys regardless of which lender was offering them. ``People tend to be swayed by the big brand names and play safe despite the fact that much better offers are available,'' he says.

John Charcol chief executive, Keith Scott, says internet mortgage shopping will considerably reduce the number of active lenders, making many of the smaller outfits on the moneyXtra site irrelevant.

This is why his site only draws on the top 25. He reckons the big selling point of charcolonline compared to its rivals will be the 32 ``exclusive best-buy mortgage deals'' on offer.

Homebuyers with complicated arrangements, however - those looking to release equity with a remortgage or calculate the cost of a split interest-only and repayment mortgage - will almost certainly still need to talk to an expert to explain their case.