A property puzzle..

[GidgetGirl]

This scenario might simply be impossible, but I thought I’d see if there are any clever mumsnetters who could see a way in which it might work.

My friend wants to buy a commercial property for her successful and established business. Most of the good ones (with flats above) are a little out of her budget.

I want to buy a flat above a shop to live in. Primarily because I want a private garden and don’t want to be in a big communal block. It can be tricked to get a mortgage on these but certainly not impossible. The main issue is they rarely come up for sale alone.

Is there an obvious way my friend and I could pool our resources to buy a commercial property with flat above without being tied into a mortgage together forevermore? Essentially she would want to end up owning the shop individually as a separate entity, and I would want to own the flat above individually as a separate entity.

Could you buy the whole thing together, draw up an agreement to sell whichever bits are relevant to each other as and when?

Obvs not knowledgable but thought a bump might help too.

I don’t know the answer to your question, but would you get a garden with a flat above a shop? I would assume that any space behind the shop would be used for parking/deliveries/storage etc. And if you did subsequently divide ownership, any outside space would surely need to stay with the ground floor property i.e. the shop (although you could divide the outside space I suppose and own half each).

You do around here - think traditional Victorian terraced streets. They come up for rent semi-regularly and the garden is always given over entirely to the flat above, which they access either via an external stair or an internal stair in what used to be the rear outrigger. A couple have come up for sale over the past couple of years too, but sadly just before I was in a position to buy.

The (small) shops below either have no access to the rear garden at all, or are allocated a small separate yard area.

Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. I’ll speak to my mortgage advisor next week and see what she says. Thought I’d ask on here in the meantime - it’s a bit of an odd one!

Yes you can share the freehold

Yep I presumed so - I’m really wondering if we can somehow split the mortgage and the freehold to cover the two separate entities once we’ve bought the property.