Those who remortgaged in order to extend

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What did the lender require if you in order to do this? Plans? A quote?

Please say if you used existing or new lender.

Thank you!

Following for interest as we hope to do the same !

All we needed was enough equity in the house to withdraw - they didn’t check that we were actually going to spend it on extending the house.

We added 10k to our mortgage to put towards a new kitchen and they just asked what we wanted the money for. No quotes but then £10k was less than half the cost of the kitchen so probably not an issue to a lender. We also had lots of equity. I’d use London and country brokers who will advise you.

We just asked for the option to borrow £100k and they agreed but our current mortgage is 50% current market value and 50% of our max amount they would lend to us on our income so we had scope even if it doesn’t add value.

It was our existing lender and they had no interest in quotes etc, we could withdraw as much equity up to 80%LTV I think. It was really straightforward.

I’m sure if you pass all the affordability checks that’s all they care about

Borrowed more from existing lender to build extension when we remortgaged. No checks on what the money would be used for.

Well these are reassuring

We want to max our LTV as much as they will allow but this will still only bring our affordability to about 1/3 of what we could borrow so we will just need to see how high they allow us to go.

Another question, maybe more relevant for people who did extend than doing other work - when did you do your application? At what stage in the planning process? It all seems a bit chicken and egg to me!

Grateful for the responses.

This was just pre covid and our mortgage company was really picky. They wanted plans and to know when it was completed. We then went back for another 35k, with loads of equity etc, it was just to help give a bit of a buffer, it was so annoying with wanting all information, insurance details , sign offs from building control, that. We just dint do it.

the mortgage broker did say that he wondered if someone new was in the team as he had had a run of pernickety requests ….

We borrowed the money before beginning as we wanted to be sure they would lend to us. Our broker did the usual affordability checks and applied for us.

Imagine it depends on the lender. We have recently done this with NatWest (existing lender). They required architect plans, proof of planning permission and building quote. Plus usual affordability stuff (3 months pay slips and an intense interrogation about outgoings). But it was pretty straight forward really and they were happy to give us the money.

Nothing. We had sufficient equity in the house to borrow and take out funds. Just needed to pass the usual affordability tests.

Just that we had enough equity available and enough income to afford the repayments.

We didn't time it well as we thought we'd manage without needing to remortgage (intended a home improvement loan instead - then it went beyond scope of one of those) so left it a bit late. That meant applying for a mortgage after the existing kitchen had come out and structural work was going on. The lack of kitchen meant the house was technically unmortgageable which really limited choice of providers...

It did all work out fine in the end!

The kitchen thing was particularly mad as we'd already bought our new kitchen in the Howdens sale and it was being stored by our builder so we HAD a kitchen, just not in the house!

@RidingMyBike that’s mad and exactly the type of situation we’d end up in!

It sounds like for the majority of people they didn’t need too much info as long as you passed all the normal checks which is great. Hopefully it goes that way for us just to make it all a bit easier.