As our home buying products are not debt or credit based, you do not have to purchase equity in your home from us each month. This means it will not affect your credit rating in any way if you do not purchase equity from us, and this will not be reported to credit reference agencies either. However, we may share data with credit reference agencies where you fail to make rental payments on time.
We do however, carry out credit file searches at various points in the process, such as:
When you register to become an investor and again after set periods of time as part of our KYC process - this is to comply with financial regulations. These soft searches will not affect your credit score.
When we are processing your initial home provision application to verify your ID and address - again this will only be a soft search and will not affect your credit score
Accepting your application for finance (when your time on the waiting list comes up) - we carry out AML and credit searches at this stage. This will be a hard search, much like when you apply for a traditional mortgage. You may notice your score dip after a hard search, but this is only temporarily and should bounce back after a couple of months providing there aren’t more hard searches during this time.