At RockHopper, we understand and adopt a more common sense approach to Armed Forces personnel and are able to arrange for more flexible and unique underwriting criteria. We can look at differing income types, or the fact you may be stationed at home or abroad whilst applying.

Applicants who are serving in the British Army, Navy, Marines, Royal Air Force are eligible to be considered for the Forces Help To Buy (FHTB) scheme, whereby a deposit can be raised using the facility of an interest free loan of up to £25,000, depending on your circumstances. This includes those in active service, civilian and military support staff. The mortgage will be based on standard lending criteria and rates.

The key factor to our armed forces mortgages is that the lender will offer greater flexibility on criteria and will accommodate more specialist and unique requirements. These may include:-

• Enabling Armed Forces personnel to purchase in the UK when stationed abroad
• Enabling credit and other checks to be undertaken manually and not reliant on unfair automated credit systems
• Enabling an override on the need for a 3-5 year UK based address history
• Enabling the use of the Forces Help to Buy Scheme
• Enabling consent to let a property whilst remaining on competitive residential mortgage rates
• Enabling the property to remain unoccupied
• Enabling those with missed payments and impaired credit to still be considered

We understand that the job involves travel and when you’re deployed to a battle zone, mortgages and finance may take a back seat. We are regularly advised by serving personnel that due to a short-notice relocation, credit payments were inevitably missed.  We are able to consider customers with impaired credit and will always consider each mortgage on a case by case basis. The underwriters we use will take a human, holistic approach and this avoids the automated computer saying “No”.

We will deal with your loan enquiry over the phone or email, which works well if you are stationed abroad. We will quickly be able to assess your circumstances and determine how much credit you can afford. We will advise on the amount you can borrow, the level of the monthly repayments, mortgage interest rates and whether the mortgage can be on a repayment basis, paying both interest and capital or pure interest only.

We will calculate your annual income and other loan or credit card commitments, assessing the overall affordability of the mortgage.

To discuss your situation with one of our consultants, either call us or send an online enquiry and we will make contact.