How to Apply
Talk to us
We can help you right from the planning stage of your project and can guide you through the process, so give us a call - we’ll be pleased to help!
Send us some details
To help us give you the best advice on what you can borrow, we ask you to send us the following information:
- The Annual Accounts for your Organisation for the last three years
- Details of the property you wish to buy or develop and your plans for the site
- Your strategy for how the Organisation will be able to afford the repayments on the mortgage
Once we receive this information from you, we aim to give you an initial opinion within 48-72 hours. If we can help, and if you are ready to apply, we will then arrange a face-to-face meeting to complete a detailed application.
Detailed Application
Where we think we can help an Organisation with their project, we ask to meet with the Trustees or Directors to discuss the project in more detail and complete a detailed application. For smaller mortgages, this meeting can sometimes be arranged over the phone but to help us properly understand your project, we prefer to meet you in person to talk through your plans and see the site. We do ask you to pay the mortgage application fee at this meeting to cover our travel costs as we have found from experience that this helps to speed up the process.
The decision
After the meeting we may ask for other information. Once we’ve got everything we need your proposal is presented to our Credit Committee, which is made up of the Bank’s Directors, whose details are on our website. The committee includes church ministers and business people who fully understand Churches, Charities and other similar organisations, together with the challenges they face. We aim to give an answer to your application within two weeks of us receiving all the information.
Valuation and Offer
Once a mortgage is approved in principle, the property which is to be given as security is valued by an Independent Surveyor. Once we receive their report, if everything is acceptable we will make a mortgage offer to your Organisation.
Drawdown
Once we make a mortgage offer to your Organisation and this is accepted by the Trustees/Directors, the paperwork and legal matters must be dealt with. This will involve the Bank’s Solicitors and it can take four to eight weeks for this to be finalised so make sure you leave plenty of time when making your application. Once our Solicitors’ work is completed, the mortgage money can then be drawn.
