Home Buying Abroad - Mortgage or Loan?

Gopes

OK, my flatmate and I have been considering the possibilities of buying old houses, doing them up and selling them has holiday homes.

My flatmate is Spanish, and I grew up in Portugal, so these two countries are where we are looking at for language reasons.

We are budgetting to spend £40k between fees, purchase and improvements. We are intending to spend between £20k and £30k on the actual purchase of the property (small 1-2 bedroom village house).

Question is funding. Considering the (relatively) small purchase price, and the fact that their are two of us, a mortgage may not be feasible.

We are not home owners in the UK, and both have stable employment in the financial services sector - incomes of approx £25k and £30k. Our current monthly outgoings including rent, etc. are of the order of £1000k each, so we have approx surpluses of £500 and £700 respectively.

The only debt we have is about £6k in interest free credit cards, but currently have about £6.5k in ISAs and savings accounts - so essentially no debt, but no savings either.

We are in no huge hurry to start - we figure on doing a load more research over the summer, and start making weekend trips to parts of Spain and Portugal in the Autumn, viewing prospective properties/areas, with the hope of buying towards Xmas.

Thus we would probably have between £6k and £8k saved - would need to raise £30-£35k approx - possibly less, as purchase of building materials could be put on existing credit cards (have to look into costs of doing this).

The intention would be to buy, rennovate and sell within 6-9 months, thus minimising the necessary profit margain to make our project worthwhile.

The idea is that during the rennovation stage, we would take it in turns to take long weekends, using up our holiday allowances - that way, we could ensure that someone was their to oversee renovation for at least 5 out of 7 days per week over say 4 months.

Question is, would we be likely to be able to each get an unsecured loan repayable of 5 years for say £15k each (intend to apply separately)? Once the house was sold, we could either payback the loan, or more likely, reinvest the proceeds in another project.

Is that a stupid question? I had dismissed the mortgage as two cumbersome - as we may only need it for 6 months or so, and as a considerable part of our outlay will be rennovation costs, I suspect that the personal loan option is our best bet.

I hope this convoluted post makes sense, and would appreciate any suggestions/comments.

Regards
Gopes

P.S. Yes I did watch the channel 5 program last week - that is not what prompted this, but has to a certain extent galvanised our plan.