Buy to let - how does it work?

[fizzpops]

My husband and I are wanting to move house and if possible keep hold of our current house to rent out. Financial issues of whether this is affordable aside, how does it actually work?

We have been told that we had to be able to prove at least a month's viable income from the property in terms of rent before we could use this as a basis for a buy to let mortgage. Effectively we would have to move out of our house and rent it out for a month (still on existing mortgage) before we would be able to get a buy to let mortgage and also a mortgage for another property.

Does anyone have experience of doing this and how did it work for you?

Dh and I have done it a couple of times, ti was really straight forward but we didnt hae to do the moving out for a month thing.
We got our mortgage for our new house from the same company as was providing the btl mortgage.
on x date the building society gave us £100,000 as a mortgage on house 1
we immediately used that to pay £100,000 towards house 2 plus the building society gave us the other £100,000 as a mortgage on house 2. All happened electronically of course at the same time and then the £200,000 plus our deposit was used as payment for house 2.

House 1 is in an area where rental demand always outstrips supply so perhaps that is why they weren't worried? Not sure.

With the other house I moved out and got a tennant immediately and the bank insisted that as I wasn't resident that we should have it on a btl mortgage.

Good luck!

Thanks for that. We wouldn't have any problems letting it for about £300 more than we are currently paying for our mortgage.