Possibly stupid question about remortgaging

[GorgeousLadyofWrestling]

When you put in the value of your property, whar value do you give and what is the verification for that value?

I went on Santander’s site today (who we have our mortgage with) just to check what their rates were looking like. Ended up messing around going through their online remortgaging calculator and it asked for the value of the flat and what the current balance is on the mortgage.

In context, when we got our flat, we only had 5% deposit. In the last three years, the flat has gone up in price (we live in a huge community of identical flats so very comparable sold prices) and we’ve also been overpaying as much as we can. Between those things, the LTV has gone from 95% to 64%. However, I am very aware that that price increase is not “real” as it were. All that supposed equity is only real when we come to sell it and someone pays that price.

So just that really - it feels like the value of the property is conceptual. Do I just put in the value of the property when we bought it?

You put in the current value.

I'd look at the last sold price of an identical or very similar flat to yours and use that figure. Marketed prices and actual sold prices differ. Ideally recent, within the last 12 months. What you bought it for isn't relevant by now.

When we did ours (TSB) we'd only lived in the house 2 years so stuck £10k on top!....the system must have had some sort of internal calculations though because it valued the house a lot more and dropped us down a LTV bracket! .... not sure if Santander will do similar.

Ok cool, thank you everyone. That’s really helpful to know! I checked the Nationwide Price Index for this quarter for our postcode - the postcode is for a block of 12 flats and for other auto fill forms, you just select the flat number from the drop down. So I assume the postcode is a fairly accurate reflection as it’s the same as what flats have sold for in adjacent blocks.