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News: Students hail Buy-For-Uni revolution

Wed, 18 Apr 07

The National Union of Students' has praised a mortgage which helps students on to the property ladder...

Bath Building Society's 'Buy For Uni' product allows a student to apply for a 100 per cent mortgage which is then, usually, secured against a parent's home.

It would be granted if the student could show they could cover the cost of mortgage repayments by letting rooms in the property to friends.

NUS president Gemma Tumelty enthused:

"In a time of spiralling student debt and graduates finding it increasingly difficult to pay into pensions or buy their first home, it is great that mortgage lenders are diversifying their lending portfolio to make it easier for some students to get on the first rung of the property ladder”.

Cautious welcome

Buy for Uni was launched by Bath Building Society last March.

It was given a cautious welcome by the University of Bath's student union and a residents' association in Oldfield Park, where fears were raised about the number of students living in the area, and councillors.

Since then there have been few complaints and late last year the mortgage won an industry innovation award.

Now, as well as being backed by senior NUS officials, the product is being offered by Endsleigh - a major player in the student market - and improvements have been made to the product on offer.

"This is an exciting opportunity for us to expand the wide range of specialist products we offer to students," said Stuart Wartalski, of Endsleigh.

"We are therefore delighted to be able to promote Buy for Uni mortgages and develop the relationship that we enjoy with the society,” he added.

Developing market

Malcolm Graham-Jones, head of lending at Bath Building Society, said the scheme had worked well and added that the society could have made two or three times the number of loans it made, if it could have processed them.

"Our 'Buy for Uni' scheme has gone down brilliantly," he said.

"It's an unusual product which has taken us into a whole new market.

"People have come to us and said 'it's great to have this available', because it was something they were going to do anyway, perhaps as a buy-to-let arrangement, in another way.

"Internally it took us some time to get the processes sorted, but now it's going well.

"And we're really pleased and excited to be supported by such a major player as Endsleigh, which is the logical place to take this product, in developing this market".

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