So what was the plan going to be now the market had fallen flat and we were paying to live in weekday accommodation. Too late that we already had new jobs, in a new area too far to commute to our old house.
Of course Mr OCG had said we’d done it the wrong way round, he thought we should’ve sold and moved house and commuted back to our old job until we found new jobs. But as always it’s a chicken and egg situation, what if you’d relocated everything only to find the perfect job didn’t exist in the area you’d moved too. Hmmm no doubt it’s a real dilemma, but no doubt once everything is sorted it will have been worth it! Famous last words!
So back too the drawing board, what about taking extra mortgage against our existing property loan, we have plenty of equity in the Oxford house and we only want a ‘cheap’ house in the Midlands, that might work. But no! Contacting our mortgage provider they were winding down the product gradually and whilst they were happy for us to port our mortgage to a new property they were not offering any new borrowing. Transferring to a new lender entirely wouldn’t work as you need to show you can cope with your normal mortgage for 6 to 12 months before extra borrowing can be arranged.
A google search on options revealed a ‘new type of mortgage customer’ Let to Buy. It seems a whole host of people out there are in the same boat as us, a need to sell in order to move to a new job, but unable to, quick enough. So clearly a new market has emerged, let your house out while you buy a new one. Of course there are conditions attached, the main one being the amount you can ‘release’ from your property to buy your next one is based on the amount you can rent the property out for.
Fortunately for us, Oxford area commands high rental values so our house would potentially rent for high enough to release enough money when combined with our ported mortgage to buy a house (in need of extension and modernisation) in our new area. Perfect, we now have a budget to buy somewhere in the Midlands the additional monthly cost for which is going to less than the cost of our weekday rental. It also means we can start putting down roots in our new area and although the new house wouldn’t be great, after all we still need to wait for Oxford to sell before we can do the big extension and renovations we have planned, at least we are getting started.
Hi there! We did something similar in 2012. We wanted to move to our current house but the market here was tanked, no way to sell for even what we still owed on the old house. So, we decided to rent it out and have been doing that now for 5 years. So far so good. Now the market is back up and we would sell if we had a ready buyer, but as long as our tenant is happy there, pays on time and takes care of the place, we will continue to rent to him. I’m so happy you guys found a solution!
Thank you for this, that’s good to know ❤️ we are definitely going to have to give it a try