What to do with our UK house whilst we live abroad?

[hermitcrab]

We're currently in the Middle East with dh's job, just starting our second year. DH's contract is for two years, followed by rolling renewal. We've kept our Uk house so far, it is a bit of a renovation nightmare, all work stopped once the dc's came along...9 years ago! Currently we have a cat sitter there, who moves out for a month in the summer so we can have a base of our own, and avoid stopping with the in-laws/parents.
It looks like we may now be abroad for 3-4 more years, and I am wondering if it is worth selling. The house will be too small for us on our return, as girls will be too big to share and is only a two bed.
Wondered what other people have done, and the pro's and cons of different options? I just keep going round in circles...

Can you get the work completed and then rent it out. You could reduce the rent if the tenant is prepared to look after your cat.
We've got a small house in Manchester that is rented out, we have tried to sell it a couple of times, but the market is so depressed we would lose money.
You can always rent a cottage or caravan for a month when you returned for leave every year.

That is what we'd hoped to do, but don't have the money at the mo. Lots of expat expenses we had underestimated! Good idea re renting for the month that we're back. My brain, crying out for the simple life, just wants to get rid of the house. We bought before prices shot up, so shouldn't lose money on a sale. But not sure if I'd just be making life harder down the line.... plus the children would be gutted if we sold.

We rent our house out, but it didnt require much doing to it before we left it. The new tenants got a 2k new heating system which broke just before we left :-( You can rent for 3 years without it affecting capital gains tax on re-sale. We have someone wanting to buy our house but I cannot bear to throw out good tenants, it's that family's home now and I would feel very bad about it.

In your situation, I'd get it up to rental standard and rent it, or alternatively reduce to a bargain price to sell quickly, stick the profits in some fixed rate interest accounts - we could make as much profit this way on interest as we make currently on rent.

Could there be a middle way, where you find a tenant who would appreciate a guaranteed 3 or 4 year tenancy on a lower-than-market rent in exchange for tackling some of the renovation/decorating?

Speaking from our perspective, that would be a dream situation for us as tenants - we're desperate for longer-term security than the usual 1 year letting and not adverse to doing work on a house in return for lower rent. I'm sure there are lots of people who can't buy at the moment who are in a similar position.

We're about to move to the ME and have actually just offered our house to a good friend in the neighborhood who is renting a tiny two-bed at an attractive much lower-than-market rate for our 4-bed house. In return we won't have to go through the stress of emptying it out and sprucing it up for a full on corporate let and paying the enormous agency fees that are charged on top.

We only want to cover the mortage with a little of top for maintenance, in exchange for them helping to maintain it if things go wrong and putting up with a less than newly decorated pristine home. We will also be able to leave some of our belongings stored in the house and they'll be able to use the toys and childrens books we don't want to take or that our kids have outgrown. I'm hoping they take us up because its mutually beneficial - we have people in there we trust, they benefit from a home twice the size they could normally afford.

We rent ours out, have been abroad for 4.5 years and have more to go. CGT won't affect us under the crown service proviso, so we don't have to worry about that.

Ooh do HM Revenue and I wasn't told that.

We've got a small 2 bed that we rent out. It will be too small for us by the time we get back but I like the idea that if we had to come back for some reason urgently we could (once we'd given notice to the tenants) have somewhere to live for a while. I also think that if the housing market did pick up again I wouldn't want to be left behind and not able to buy when we do return.

However, we very rarely get full rent because there's always something that the tenant wants doing, plus the agency fees etc etc and we've gone through a lot of tenants so it certainly isn't making us a lot of money. If we had a big mortgage we'd struggle to cover it.

Natation - if you are abroad by virtue of your service to HMG, and are living abroad because HMG says so, you are exempt from CGT. I checked very carefully. I'll look at the HMRC site and find you the relevant stuff.

I agree with Quodlibet, my friend rents a house which is a renovation project. It really is in dire need of improvement. She agreed a 2 year tenancy with capped low rent of £350pm. The heating system is fine but the rest of the house is in a poor condition. My friend is happy with this and has done a bit of decorating but is not obliged to do so.

Therefore you could keep a foot in the uk market and wait for it to improve before you consider selling.

Natation:

www.hmrc.gov.uk/helpsheets/hs283.pdf

seems to cover it all.

It is a good idea to rent it out and keep your foot on the property ladder.

Our UK house doubled in value when we were expats. Had we sold it, we would not have been able to move back.

We rent our house and I wish we had sold it. We had long term tenants, which I thought was good until they moved out and we had to spend almost £10k on repairs and renovation. Now we have new tenants, and already the bills are coming in again (not because they are bad tenants, just lots of extras really, as we've been told there is damp and the last electric inspection said there was stuff to update). We have a management agent that takes a great deal of our money and provides not very much in return it feels. Plus I couldn't remortgage and have to pay a premium to rent it out (which is bloody annoying). I'm going to sell at the end of this tenancy, it's just to stressful and too expensive.

But if we didn't have a fairly sizable mortgage it would be OK (after the mortgage we get about £500 a month, which sounds like plenty, but once you add in the 16% management costs, 'normal' repairs, and allow for void periods leaves very little over). I expect to sell at a loss and I'll be very relieved when I do.

What about renting it out via Council etc ? at least the rent is guaranteed