Turn-around times on mortgage applications

is anyone finding the turn-around by banks of said apps slow? How could this possibly be the case? Even though they have dropped some staff, they most likely will be letting more personnel go over the next year or two. They;re not busy - so why does it take so long?

(i've a good broker on the case - but i'm still curious as to why they take so long).

A couple of reasons spring to mind.

There's a smaller number of lenders out there and some of them either aren't lending much at all or their rates are not competitive. So the ones that are actually lending or have competitive rates (AIB, Bank of Ireland, ICS) are getting a much bigger slice of the pie, even though the pie is much smaller. 3,259 new mortgages to the value of €577 million were issued during the first quarter of 2011 - IBF figures. That's down a lot on the boom years but it's stll a lot of processing.

Many lenders have redeployed staff from their new business area to deal with their only growth area - arrears handling. So chances are there's a lot less people working in the new business areas of the various lenders.

I hear two weeks is average turnaround time for a new application these days.

Hi,
I went for a mortgage application recently and BOI turned it around with all the suppoering documentation in 1 week. With the same documentation and even though I bank with AIB it took about 4 weeks to approve with them - they came back with queries and questions. So even a small query can delay things easily and times vary.
Regards
Mike

What kind of queries and questions do they raise, just interested as I've just sent an application to Aib