Anyone bought the house you are renting?

[Plumviolet]

We are currently privately renting a property in Edinburgh. Great location, good schools and we love the house. The house require a significant amount of money to get it up to standard. Has anyone ever bought the house they are renting and what's the best way to approach it?

Bumping as we are interested in possibly doing this!

Ha ha. We're just not sure how to go about it. Our landlord is a bit of a shark (rumours from neighbours) so we think he might only take a ridiculous offer but the house really is a mess. The electrics and shot and all the windows are rotten and he has cut every corner possible for a number of years from a maintenance piint of view. It's so frustrating living in a house we can't fix.

We just approached our landlord via the managing agent. Explained that we were interested in buying the house and would he mind letting the landlord know to potentially open up a discussion. Agent came back setting out landlord wasn't interested in selling.

I think it depends where you are, what the rental market is like, what house prices are doing. Where we are, rental market is buoyant, house prices are shooting up, so in fairness, why wouldn't the landlord hold onto it, having his mortgage covered by the rent and watching the value increase? Did get a very nice letter from the landlord afterwards setting out what wonderful tenants we'd been!

Obviously, if you think your landlord might be interested in getting his hands on the cash now, it might be a different story.

I bought a house I was renting, it was pretty straightforward I think, although the letting agent ended up taking a hefty commission from the owners. I did know that they had rented the house out purely because they couldn't sell it, so I contacted them directly and just asked.

It worked out well all round, they got a sale without losing rental income, and I got a much better deal than I would have done if I'd bought on the open market as they were keen to sell to me rather than have me move out and start from scratch.

Funnily enough, I'm now in the process of selling a rental property to our tenants. I hope it will be just as straightforward - our tenants let us know they'd be interested and we quite want to get shot, so I'm getting it valued this week and hopefully we can come to an agreement on price.

The advantages of buying a house you already live in are (1) you pretty much know what you're getting (I didn't bother getting a survey, although I know this is not advisable), (2) often cheaper than market value and (3) no moving costs. I'd go for it!

Thanks Mandy and daisy. Good to hear successful stories. We let from him directly so no letting agent to deal with. Think he may be in too good a deal with us paying off his mortgage. We'll give it a shot and see what happens. Think he may want more than the property is worth. He's in total denial about how much work needs doing to get it up to scratch.