UK Expat Mortgage Providers
In this article we take a look at which UK banks offer mortgages for expats. (We’ve gone into a lot more detail about expat mortgages here).
Lots of British expats want to buy property back home. Some like to have a base back in the UK that they visit frequently, some have got one eye on retirement. The majority though, tend to be looking at rental property.
Even expats with lower salaries often have larger amounts of disposable income than they did at home. It doesn’t take long before they start thinking of investing and in many cases a buy to let property seems like the perfect solution. The only problem is getting mortgage!
Expats living in a developed country, working for a larger international company, with a large salary shouldn’t have a problem. However, if you’re in a developing country, working for a local company with a lower salary it might not be so easy to get a UK expat mortgage. Luckily, there is hope.
Although, the number of lenders that offer UK expat mortgages is more limited for this second group, there are options available. Before we cover which lenders are worth contacting there are a few things to bear in mind.
Regulations
Firstly, it’s worth pointing out that it wasn’t always so difficult to get a mortgage. The crash in 2008 had a lot to do with the difficulties faced today. In 2014 the City regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), introduced regulations to make sure extreme cases of questionable mortgage lending won’t be repeated.
To make matters worse there were also European wide rule changes in 2016. Without going into too much detail, the bottom line is that it is much harder to get a UK expat mortgage than it used to be.
Consent to let
The second point worth mentioning is that if you already have a property in the UK with a lender that doesn’t do buy to let or expat mortgages it doesn’t mean you can’t continue with them. You can usually just apply for consent to let. With this, you pay a smallish fee, say a couple of hundred pounds to get consent and then a similar sized fee on an annual basis.
Criteria
Finally, different providers have different criteria, but many for many of them they won’t lend for properties with a value less than £100,000. They usually require a deposit between 20-40% and the rental income must be much greater than the mortgage repayments. As a rule of thumb, 1.5% can be assumed, so if your mortgage repayments are £400/month, your rent would need to be £600/month.
Mortgage providers
We’ve compiled a list of mortgage providers below. All of them deal with expats one way or anther.
It’s worth just bearing in mind the fact that bank policies change from time to time. Sometimes lenders are willing to deal with clients directly sometimes they only work through mortgage brokers.
In addition, oftentimes you can get a much better deal using a a dedicated expat mortgage broker. In fact, most people most of the time are going to do better by going with a mortgage broker.
If you haven’t yet found one, we’ve taken a look at three of the best for expats here.
Bank of China
HSBC
Land Bay
Marsden Building Society
Nat West International
Newcastle Building Society
Saffron Building Society
Santander
Skipton International
Vida Home Loans
You can find more articles on property here.
