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Showing results for tags 'remortgage'.
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Hi all, Not sure this is the correct section, also not sure if this topic hasn't been raised before, but have trawled through in the search section and couldn't find a match. My wife and I have been in Oz for 6.5 years now and have rented out UK property for this time. When we arrived our, at the time mortgage deal was expiring and I painfully set about getting a new mortgage from Oz, which took ages because of the complications of living abroad. We eventually found one with Halifax and have been on this since. With the interest rates on the up we'd like to lock into a fixed interest rate deal as that helps with managing our rental property, but after phoning Halifax they don't offer any rental mortgages at present. I have a feeling it'll be a painful experience trying to find another company we can use. Has anyone on here tried to do this and had a good experience, if so any recommendations on companies to try. Any advice or help would be much appreciated. Thanks, Paul.
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Hi All, I've been reading posts for many months now where people have struggled with the restrictions around providing UK buy-to-let mortgages to UK expats in Australia. Largely the difficulties arise because the mortgage provider is required to be regulated both in the UK and Australia, meaning they need a presence in both countries. This significantly limits the size of the market. Prices for these products quoted to me by brokers have been much higher than equivalent products provided to UK residents. Further the broker fees have been in the thousands, not hundreds. This might be a familiar story for some of you, or at least it will become thus in the not too distant future. The good news is that I've just had a really positive experience on this front. After speaking to many brokers and being provided with higher level interest rates and exorbitant broker fees, i was able to find a solution that was equivalent to what i would pay and receive in UK. I've just completed on the mortgage. The answer was that I engaged directly with HSBC UK. The only difficulty was the fact that I had to do it all myself without a broker. On the flip side it gave me access to exactly the same products UK residents receive. In doing so i'm saving a lot of money and have been able to secure a long term fixed rate mortgage so I can carry on out here in Australia and not have to deal with this headache again for quite some time. To the details. HSBC offer 2 avenues for mortgages to Ex pats in Australia: The first route is via an Ex Pat mortgage through HSBC Expat. This one was prohibitive for us as it requires a certain amount of capital (i believe it was £60k+, maybe more) to set up an HSBC offshore expat account. This might be appropriate for someone with money sat around. The second route is via a regular buy-to-let mortgage route. The website link is here: https://www.hsbc.co.uk/1/2/mortgages/buy-to-let-mortgages Please note the eligibility criteria. Critically you need to have lived in the house at some point since you bought it for at least 6 months - so this mortgage doesn't suit you if you are an overseas landlord looking to buy an investment buy-to-let. Also when we applied as an overseas landlord the minimum annual salary requirement (single or joint, depending on the application), was £75k - although i cannot find the requirement on their website anymore so perhaps things have changed since we started the process in January. They also say that the rent must be 145% of the mortgage repayments. I'm not sure whether this has changed since we started our application but they were only looking for 145% of the interest portion of our capital repayment mortgage when we applied. The whole process took about 8 weeks from start to finish and it was painful because of the speed of mail and general lack of competence of some of HSBC staff. Note that we had to get some documents notarised here in Australia which cost about $150. The only document that we actually had to send by post was the signed mortgage deed. Everything else we were able to scan and send. We had our managing agent for the UK property issue the current tenancy agreement directly to the conveyancing company which was acceptable. This was a welcome relief to us, we are able to save at least £200 a month on what the brokers were quoting with this HSBC product, which over the long term is a really meaningful saving. I'd be more than happy to answer any questions or provide additional feedback on the process if anyone's interested. Cheers, The Ozzie Pom This post has been promoted to an article
- 10 replies
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- buy to let
- remortgage
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Hi All, I've been reading posts for many months now where people have struggled with the restrictions around providing UK buy-to-let mortgages to UK expats in Australia. Largely the difficulties arise because the mortgage provider is required to be regulated both in the UK and Australia, meaning they need a presence in both countries. This significantly limits the size of the market. Prices for these products quoted to me by brokers have been much higher than equivalent products provided to UK residents. Further the broker fees have been in the thousands, not hundreds. This might be a familiar story for some of you, or at least it will become thus in the not too distant future. The good news is that I've just had a really positive experience on this front. After speaking to many brokers and being provided with higher level interest rates and exorbitant broker fees, i was able to find a solution that was equivalent to what i would pay and receive in UK. I've just completed on the mortgage. The answer was that I engaged directly with HSBC UK. The only difficulty was the fact that I had to do it all myself without a broker. On the flip side it gave me access to exactly the same products UK residents receive. In doing so i'm saving a lot of money and have been able to secure a long term fixed rate mortgage so I can carry on out here in Australia and not have to deal with this headache again for quite some time. To the details. HSBC offer 2 avenues for mortgages to Ex pats in Australia: The first route is via an Ex Pat mortgage through HSBC Expat. This one was prohibitive for us as it requires a certain amount of capital (i believe it was £60k+, maybe more) to set up an HSBC offshore expat account. This might be appropriate for someone with money sat around. The second route is via a regular buy-to-let mortgage route. The website link is here: https://www.hsbc.co.uk/1/2/mortgages/buy-to-let-mortgages Please note the eligibility criteria. Critically you need to have lived in the house at some point since you bought it for at least 6 months - so this mortgage doesn't suit you if you are an overseas landlord looking to buy an investment buy-to-let. Also when we applied as an overseas landlord the minimum annual salary requirement (single or joint, depending on the application), was £75k - although i cannot find the requirement on their website anymore so perhaps things have changed since we started the process in January. They also say that the rent must be 145% of the mortgage repayments. I'm not sure whether this has changed since we started our application but they were only looking for 145% of the interest portion of our capital repayment mortgage when we applied. The whole process took about 8 weeks from start to finish and it was painful because of the speed of mail and general lack of competence of some of HSBC staff. Note that we had to get some documents notarised here in Australia which cost about $150. The only document that we actually had to send by post was the signed mortgage deed. Everything else we were able to scan and send. We had our managing agent for the UK property issue the current tenancy agreement directly to the conveyancing company which was acceptable. This was a welcome relief to us, we are able to save at least £200 a month on what the brokers were quoting with this HSBC product, which over the long term is a really meaningful saving. I'd be more than happy to answer any questions or provide additional feedback on the process if anyone's interested. Cheers, The Ozzie Pom
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Having just received confirmation that my PR has arrived, I now want to remortgage my property in the UK. There are no financial issues (thankfully) which should cause issues, but I'm struggling to find a lender with decent rates who doesn't require me to leave Australia when the new mortgage application is submitted. This seems entirely bizarre to me: needing to go abroad (from Australia) in order to apply for a remortgage in the UK. Has anyone else experienced this, and/or could anyone please suggest a good company to use? Many thanks
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We have been in Australia 2 years. Does anyone know of any banks that we could remortgage our UK house with? We owe 20% of its value, its rented out and our current lender will not do it!
