Mortgage advice

[Mortgageadvice2024]

DH’s parents have recently passed away. Solicitors dealing with probate have just told my DH that he is named on Land Registry with some other family members on a solely owned property that his parents were renting out. He had no idea. He has never received rent or paid into anything. When we applied for a mortgage I recall one question was “do you own any other property” and of course we put no. I am very worried about this. What do we do? I don’t want him to be accused of any kind of fraud. He literally had no idea. Should we tell the mortgage company? What if they cancel our mortgage? Will our house be repossessed?

There are only two reasons that I can think that this would matter:

1. if you were buying your first property and so took advantage of first time buyers’ benefits
2. so that the lender can accurately assess your assets.

Honestly, I wouldn’t worry too much. He has a share of a property and will be able to prove that he hasn’t signed any official documents related to it. No one is going to repossess your house.

Nobody is going to cancel your mortgage or repossess your house because of this.

You might have been asked this question during an affordability assessment which would have taken commitments like rent or mortgage on another property into account.

You would also have been asked this when calculating how much stamp duty you owed. It’s possible you’ve underpaid on this if you owned another property at the time. You should probably speak to a conveyancing solicitor.

Just to add, as I don’t think I made this clear enough: you may have committed tax fraud by underpaying on stamp duty, and you need to figure out if this is the case. It all depends when they signed the property over to him.

Am surprised they were able to do this without his knowledge.