Frustrating and repetitive but got me there - Avoid Insurance services and Lisa like the plague
After a referral from my partner, I was able to engage with MCS and in particular Simon Penn. Simon is very professional and courteous and clearly knows his stuff and is well-grounded in the mortgage market. Not fiercely aligned to anyone in particular, but Halifax appears to come near the top of the business preferred lenders.
Whilst acknowledging that mortgages are tough to go through and require lots and lots of information of varying types and periods problems soon appeared when the same information was being re-requested several times by 2 different people and often information already provided or provide a month earlier re-requested.
The business is small, it doesn't charge a fortune. We were able to get our mortgage sorted after 5 months, and despite a mortgage in principal agreement, we never got the actual confirmation of this, and it seemed not to matter when it came to the crunch.
Simon got us there, he tried hard, but he is let down by overlapping support from part-time assistants and poor record keeping or email management.
I would note recommend the follow-up services from Lisa for insurance. This was a lesson in lazy and really "not bovvered" action from Lisa. What this process really is, is a referral process for leads to 3rd parties that can't help you anyway or at least in my situation the property we bought was not suitable for the 3rd party referral. Avoid Lisa and avoid this part of the service to save hours of wasted effort, and even if you agree to share your data with the office staff they still don't do anything with it, and leave you to spend time with other companies filling in the blanks.