Specialist Bad Credit Mortgage Information for Yorkshire

Yorkshire, the historic County of York, is a region rather than a single county in any practical sense, and its housing markets behave accordingly. We treat it here as the broad area covering West, South and North Yorkshire plus the East Riding, because that is how most people searching for a home in the area think about it.

The result is a region where the deposit needed for the same percentage varies by a factor of nearly three between neighbouring cities. The five markets below cover most of where adverse-credit purchases actually happen.

According to HM Land Registry's UK House Price Index, typical prices across the region run from roughly £140,000 in Hull to around £400,000 in Harrogate, with the big West and South Yorkshire cities clustered between £170,000 and £240,000 and York at about £320,000.

Adverse credit usually means a 10 to 25 percent deposit rather than the 5 percent sometimes available to clean-credit buyers, with the percentage rising for recent or unsatisfied defaults and CCJs. The table shows what the two most common tiers look like at typical prices.

The hardest part of buying with adverse credit is rarely the monthly payment. It is the deposit, because specialist lenders demand more equity to offset the credit risk. In the South East that requirement routinely reaches £50,000 to £80,000 in cash. In most of this region it does not.

A 15 percent deposit on a typical Hull or Bradford home is £21,000 to £25,500. Even a 25 percent deposit, the level sometimes asked of applicants with recent or multiple issues, stays around £35,000 to £42,500 in those cities. That puts specialist lending within reach of buyers who would be priced out of it entirely further south, and it is why the area sees a steady flow of adverse-credit purchases that simply could not happen at southern prices.

Two caveats are worth knowing. First, some lenders set minimum property values or minimum loan sizes, often around £50,000 to £75,000, which can rule out the very cheapest terraces in parts of Hull, Bradford or South Yorkshire towns like Doncaster and Barnsley. Second, back-to-back houses and some other non-standard construction common in West Yorkshire need a lender comfortable with the property type as well as the credit history. Neither problem is unusual or unsolvable, but both are worth raising with a broker early.

Lending criteria are national, so a default is scored the same in Sheffield as in Surrey, and nothing about the Yorkshire and the Humber region changes that. Specialist lenders look at when each default or CCJ was registered, how much it was for, whether it has been satisfied, and how your accounts have run since. Time is the biggest factor: entries over three years old and settled open up far more options, and after six years they drop off your file altogether.

Sensible preparation looks the same everywhere in the region. Get your statutory reports from Experian, Equifax and TransUnion, since lenders check different agencies and entries do not always appear on all three. Correct any errors, especially default dates, which directly affect how lenders treat the entry. Build your deposit with the table above in mind. Our eligibility checker shows how your circumstances map against typical specialist criteria, and our timeline planner shows when each entry on your file stops being a barrier. Then use a whole-of-market broker rather than applying speculatively, because failed applications leave footprints that make the next attempt harder.

To be clear about what we are: DefaultMortgage.co.uk is an information website. We do not lend, broker or advise, and we never promise approval. We aim to make sure you understand the moving parts before you speak to a regulated professional.