Solicitor fee for remortgaging and paying off HTB Equity Loan

sturgeon

I've read up the guide on this site for remortgaging. It states that usually the lender covers legal fees, is this right?


I am remortgaging to pay off my Help to Buy equity loan in full (the 20% loan I was given 2 years ago). I have spoken to the solicitor I originally dealt with and they are quoting £950 all in to deal with this, including £400 + VAT for the remortgage, £250 for managing repayment of equity loan, the rest is land registry fees/searches/bank transfers etc.


Is this a competitive/reasonable quote? Could I actually remortgage and get the lender to use a solicitor to cover the remortgaging and just pay the extra £250/300 or so to cover the repayment of equity loan?


Anyone else who has gone through this would be really helpful. Thanks!

ACG

Free legals are normally available on remortgages. But it would not include the extra HTB bit. I would expect you to be able to do that though.

Check with your lender who they will use for free legals and then call them up.

sturgeon

Ah ok, thank you. Does the free legals include all the fees for land searches/bankruptcy searches/bank transfers etc usually?


I've just read an article that says remortgages for HTB require you to have gained at least 10% equity in the home, is that right? I've probably only paid off £12k of the mortgage but that leaves about £30k leftover, I'm pretty confident the value has gone up by more than that but now am concerned this all hangs on a valuation. Not heard of this 10% rule before.


Not sure what to do now. Should I be consulting a mortgage adviser to proceed as normal, then see what happens? If I independently hire a solicitor surely they'll charge their full fee even if my mortgage is rejected for this 10% equity reason. Plus I would be paying for a valuation with my lender too (how much is that these days, £500?)

Thrugelmir

Remortgaging costs add up. There's the mortgage exit fee to be considered as well.