Any mortgage surveyors out there? Remortgaging help!

[fireworkkinder]

We are about to embark on a house extension that would increase our home from a 4 bed to 5. We are financing by paying for the “shell” of the extension with cash then hoping to remortgage (current deal up in November) to finish off the job and recoup some of our cash in bank savings. Does anyone know how we “officially” change the house from a 4 bed to 5 for mortgaging purposes, which authority this with and if we need to? We don’t want the mortgage company to do a driveby valuation and not know we have increased the footprint/bedrooms/spec of the house.

The other thing I would look into is if there's a problem with the work being ongoing. When we had works a few years ago our broker advised us to remortgage with the same lender as he said that part done work can cause issues on a remortgage.

Oh wow I didn’t realise that might be the case. Imagine if we couldn’t remortgage at all, eeek! Did they mention how complete the works need to be? We think we will be able to get the shell up and the roof on but none of the knock through started.

Remortgages are best treated as brand new mortgages in my experience. Don't go to your existing lender you'll never get the best deal.
If it was me I'd get an independent mortgage broker to do this work for you. If you go armed with a rough valuation of the new value now it's a 5 bed and take it from there. They, (mortgage company) will send their own RICS valuer around so you don't need to worry about that

The problem is, the house isn’t currently a 5 bed. We have a mortgage broker but we don’t want to waste his time seeing as the house isn’t even finished yet. I know when we purchased this house, they didn’t send out a surveyor at all, it was a “driveby” valuation and they didn’t even come out to look at it, just based it on sold prices in the area. This is the bit, how do we make sure they know it has gone from a 4 bed to 5?

Im not an expert but afaik for a bedroom to be classed a such, you’ll have to have to get a certificate from the local authority (either planning permission or building regs compliance) and only then will it be classed as a bedroom. Then you’ll have to amend the council’s and land registry records.

No lender will class a ‘shell’ as living space and neither will the council. Without the latter’s approval, it might never be classed as a bedroom no matter how fancy you make it.

Thankyou that’s really useful! When I say shell, I mean plastered with electrics/plumbing/windows & doors done but may not have decorated/carpeted yet! Do you think this would count?

No idea!

Has the council’s planning person not told you what they would require to sign it off?

To be honest I haven’t read much of the building regulation stuff. I know that’s the part that gets the “sign off” but I don’t know how or if that correlates to mortgages. I was hoping someone on here might be or know a surveyor so they could advise me first hand!

What's the actually difference in the value as you perceive it? Unless you get someone round to value it they're not going to take into account the work you've done, and I don't think you can guarantee there will be any substantial change in value anyway. How tight is the mortgage borrowing and how much of an increase in value do you need to borrow what you need?

Basically is you're spending the cash in the hope you can borrow it back on the increased value I'm not sure that's a given. Can't you wait, remortgage to borrow a bit extra and keep the cash savings?

Essentially yes. House is currently worth 400k and we have had 3 agents round who say once we complete the work to the agreed standard and add the 5th bedroom it’ll be worth 500k at a minimum. Mortgage is currently 330k balance, we have looked to borrow an additional 50k when we remortgage so total borrowing would be 380k but as this puts us in a LTV of 95% (we cannot borrow more than this due to LTV amount), the interest rate is near 6%, if we borrow that additional amount once the house is “done” and valued at 500k we would be with a LTV at 76% and the interest rate would be down in the 4% and thus saving us a fair few hundreds of pounds each month. We could choose to mortgage more then too it’s just to show like for like comparison of borrowing the same amount of money.