Process for buying a house off a relative

[Clutterfreeintraining]

I currently live in a property owned by a relative.
For several reasons, relative has asked me to buy it off them.
Does anyone know what the process is for doing this? Or know which direction to point me in? Presumably we don't need to use an estate agent.
We've agreed a price and I have a mortgage in principle but looking at what I need to do next.

You need to go and apply for the mortgage with whichever lender gave you the mortgage promise. If the family member is giving you a discount on the house this can be used as a 'deposit' without any money changing hands, if not you'll still need a deposit.

All the legal paper work must be done via a solicitor for both the seller and buyer. I would also suggest getting a survey done, because it will be the biggest purchase of your life and it would be money well spent, the survey may uncover something that you are not aware of !

Thanks for the replies.
It is being offered for under market value (approx 20% under) but I have a 25% deposit which I wanted to use to reduce how much I have to borrow.
It's a small, low(ish) value property but will eventually need a fairly significant amount of work.
I'm wondering if there's another way to work this out

Next step is solicitor. They should guide you through. We did this. We didn’t do a survey as we knew the problems etc, house had been in family since built so wouldn’t have thrown up any surprises.

Ok, thanks.
It's a similar situation here...relative has owned it for 25 years and I've lived in it for 10.
I'm wondering if it'd be cheaper to take out a 5yr loan instead. Repayments would be higher but completely manageable and the amount of interest repayable would be considerably less.

You can overpay the mortgage to bring it down more quickly and pay it off sooner. Or get an offset one, where your savings count against the mortgage, but if you need to spend some (eg for that building work) you can do that.

Re the conveyancing, it's not actually compulsory to use a solicitor. See if your library has a "doing your own conveyancing" book and have a look, if you are not sure you want a solicitor.

I would do the survey though- it will give you a sense of what the work is going to entail, and let you know if anything else unexpected is brewing. But I do like a survey, others might not bother.

Go to a solicitor. Why would you take out a loan rather than a short term mortgage?

Messy - thanks. I had a good play around on a mortgage calculator yesterday and found one that would calculate overpayments too so that has encouraged me.
As it's a first time purchase (I'm really quite clueless!, I think it's safer all round if I use a solicitor.

Howhot - I was looking into a loan instead of a mortgage because I thought I would pay less, overall, in interest. Also, several people I know have taken out a loan, rather than a mortgage when the figure is relatively low. However, having looked at several repayment options, I'm going to apply for a mortgage and try to overpay as much as possible.

Have you looked at reducing the mortgage term to the same length as the loan quote ie 5 years? The amount of interest then should be pretty low

Yes, I did and yes, the interest was pretty much the same then.
I think what will work best for me is to take out a mortgage over a longer term and overpay as much as I can. That'll give me some flexibility if my finances change.