New Mortgage - Help To Buy Help

Grezz24

Hi All,

I am after some advise around the next steps for me and my wife's potential mortgage application.

some history - looking to buy a 3 or 4 bed house - new build to take advantage of the 20% Govt help to buy equity loan.

So presuming that the house is £220,000 (the ones we have seen are £180,000 - 250,000):
Deposit (5%) - £11,000 (currently we have £4,000 but are saving £1000 a month so expect to be in a position to buy by the end of the year)
Govt (20%) - £44,000
Mortgage (75%) - £165,000

We have an agreement in principle for just under £200,000. so that would cover the 165k mortgage element (pending full credit check etc).

My questions are:

1. We are looking at a new build, when should we approach and express our interest, im presuming we must at least have our 5% deposit before we can be in a position to do anything other than look / be taken serious by the building companies etc.
2. If we were to buy off plan, would we be able to put our names down for a house before having the full deposit, as we have the time to save while its being built (im guessing this is a no)
3. I plan on speaking with a mortgage adviser to go through everything, when would be best to start this process, when we have our full 5% deposit?

Thanks All.

G

PapaShango84

Depends on the timings of the new build I think; we put down on a new build in December when we had perhaps 3% deposit saved, knowing that we would have at least 5% (and cover for fees) by the time we would have to apply (which we are doing next week). This is for a house available in July.

allyant

Recently went through HTB with new builder. The builder wanted the contract signed within 30 days of reserving the property (£500 reservation fee although variable depending on the builder). This is flexible it ended up taken us 2 months due to issues with mortgage provider.

They also want the deposit to be held by our lawyers when the contract is signed too.

crystalpinks

Usually about £250-£500 to reserve then you'd need 5% of the purchase price on exchange of contracts (a month or two after reserving.

Grezz24

Thanks all,

so its probably best we start looking at new houses shortly, to get a feel for what each building company operates like?

crystalpinks

Yeah but with all the big builders you're going to need have the £11k ready 28 days after reserving (give or take a couple of weeks) so if you only have £4K now it may be a bit premature ?