ASB temporarily closes door to many preapprovals from mortgage advisers

ASB has closed its doors to many preapproval applications from mortgage advisers until next year.

It comes as mortgage advisers complain that the time it is taking for their applications to be processed has blown out.

Mortgage adviser Glen McLeod, from Edge Mortgages, said there were not enough staff to process broker applications.

"The banks need to start increasing their number of personnel dealing with adviser work to ensure panel parity," he said.

ASB said last week it would not accept preapprovals from mortgage advisers with clients who were not already ASB customers until 10 January next year.

It told advisers this was about balancing its staff's leave, and growing its team's capacity to deal with incoming application volumes.

Its overall aim was to improve its response times, ASB said.

By 10 January it expected its turnaround times to be five to seven business days, it said.

Advisers had complained that it could take as many as three weeks for an application to be dealt with by some banks at the moment.

ASB told mortgage advisers it would continue to accept preapproval applications with loan-to-value ratios (LVRs) of up to 80 percent from existing bank customers.

It was also open to applications from other borrowers who had good levels of equity and a "live deal" with a sale and purchase agreement conditional on finance.

Banks generally take a tougher line with preapprovals because they can make it harder to manage the LVR restriction "speed limits".

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