Santander and Land Separation

LynS

Is anyone able to give us any advice? We're having problems with Santander and a land separation issue.

We have planning permission on land that is part of our garden to build a small house. Our daughter and son-in-law (living with us for almost two years) have a mortgage approved in principle to undertake the self-build. We've asked Santander (our current mortgage provider on the existing property) to enact the land separation for the proposed new property, but they have told us that it is not their policy to do so. We asked our solicitor to contact them and he got the same response. We estimate that our outstanding mortgage with Santander would be considerably below the market value for the property when taking into account the land separation, around 65% LTV. It seems to us that Santander simply lack the will and interest.

We aren't able to move our mortgage to another lender.

Is there anything else we can do? It's completely halted the proposed build in its tracks and we're getting desperate to have our house back, it's pretty squashed in here!

dimbo61

Q1 Why can you not move lenders?
If you split the garden the property is worth less and that is why Santander will not play ball.
Why should Santander have less security?

LynS

Thanks for your reply.

We can't move lenders. That's all I'm prepared to say on a public forum, tbh.

I know that the security will be less but, as I said, we'll still have substantially more than enough equity in the property remaining after the separation to support our current level of borrowing.

libf

Probably should have looked into this before getting the self build things in place...

Your options are to move lender or give up on the idea.

LynS

As ludicrous as it must sound, to us as well as you, it never occurred to us. And none of the professionals we'd been dealing with pointed it out until four weeks ago. Once they did, it was blindingly obvious; far too late, of course.

So, now we know what we should have done, is there anything else, other than giving up (which we recognise might be our only option), that can be done?