Buying other apartment to own whole house

Filthylucreuk

Hello All,

I was hoping for some advise from someone with more knowledge on house buying than myself !

I own an apartment valued in the region of 110k. It is half of a house that would be valued at around 210k as a building. I owe 38k on my flat. Both flats are on a leasehold

Now, assuming the other flat came up for sale and I wanted to turn it back into a house and take over the lease , what would my options be? I can't get my head aroind how the mortgage situation would work . Would I have to take funds out of my house and get a second mortgage then put on a request to buy the lease afterwards or is there a more simple option?

Hope this makes sense I'm just baffled by the whole thing!

Cheers!!

JT

G_M

You would have to buy the lease of the other flat AND you'd have to buy the freehold of the building.

Who owns the freehold?

Filthylucreuk

Thanks for your reply.

The freehold is owned by a company on the opposite side of the country who have little to nothing to do with the house. They have expressed interest in getting rid of it before

So would I have to buy the other flat as a totally separate asset , then the freehold? So I would have two mortgages until I then combined them!?

Filthylucreuk

It may help you to know that the flats have a shared maintainance bill but individual ground rent

lincroft1710

As the freeholder is willing to sell, you could purchase the freehold now if you wanted. You may be able to extend your mortgage with your present lender to facilitate the purchase of the second apartment when it becomes available.

eddddy

Filthylucreuk wrote: »

I own an apartment valued in the region of 110k. It is half of a house that would be valued at around 210k as a building. I owe 38k on my flat. Both flats are on a leasehold

So presumably the other flat would cost abut £110k as well - which you would need to raise.

You wouldn't get a mortgage on a property for conversion/development.

You might get a mortgage for a 'second home', but I doubt that the lender would believe you would want a 'second home' in the same building.

Based on your figures, I guess you might be able to raise another £60k on your current flat. So maybe you'd need another £50k for the other flat's lease, plus the cost of the freehold, plus conversion costs, plus fees.

(You'd probably then be breaking the terms of your mortgage by doing the conversion, but you might get away with it!)


However, in general, 2 flats are usually worth more than 1 house - so you'd probably be losing money overall.

da_rule

If you could buy the freehold now, you could then determine the lease for your property by merger so your property would essentially become the freehold property and the other property would be a lease against your title.

Your existing mortgage lender may be willing to transfer the mortgage on your flat to the freehold title so that you could close the leasehold title.

Obviously taking on a freehold where there are leasehold interests does mean that you have to arrange all the works etc and comply with the Landlord and Tenants Act etc. But it also means that when the lease comes to an end it will revert back into the freehold.

teddysmum

The first thing to do is consult the current mortgage company about possibilities, as you need their cooperation.

Owain_Moneysaver

You may also need planning permission to turn the properties into one house - and this might be refused as you're reducing the number of houses in the local housing stock.

Filthylucreuk

Thank you very much all, your help is much appreciated.

I think based upon all of the advice on here, I would perhaps be better to give it a miss. I never gave thought to the requirement for planning permission and given that the conversion was done on a grade 2 building without permissson in the 70s I think I'd be opening a whole can of worms .

Many thanks to all.