English couple secure Scottish dream home with £1.2m cross-border bridging finance
A self-employed company director and his wife have purchased their dream home in Argyll with £1.2m in bridging finance from specialist lender Together.
The finance company worked in partnership with high-net-worth broker Enness Global Limited, to provide two 12-month regulated bridging loans at 50% and 66% LTV respectively.
The loans were secured against the Argyll home, the couple’s four-bedroom Cornish farmhouse and a second home, a five-bedroom house, also in Cornwall which they own.
The funds will be used to buy the Scottish property, a ten-bedroom Edwardian country house, and to pay stamp duty and legal fees. The remainder will be used to repay a mortgage secured against their main home and another second charge loan.
Dan Narwal, Together’s intermediary corporate account director, said: “This required an unusual loan structure to meet the couple’s property ambitions. While England and Scotland share a border, when it comes to property, the rules and processes involved with buying and selling can be quite different.
“Splitting the loan into two parts allowed us to work with solicitors specialising in each country, separating the funds required to buy the Argyll home from those being used to repay the existing mortgage on their English home and the second charge loan secured against a vacant residential property.”
Together’s underwriting team used full Red Book valuations from qualified RICS surveyors to confirm the value of the couple’s existing and newly purchased homes.
As the funds from the sale of the four-bedroom English farmhouse would be used to exit both bridging loans, Together also confirmed the asking price and local market appetite with the estate agency marketing the property.
An automated valuation was used to determine the value of the second English property, which the couple intend to keep, with the option to refinance on to a buy-to-let mortgage if the sale of their previous home isn’t completed before the bridging loan term ends.
Victoria Barton, partner at Enness Global, said: “On the surface, a case like this one can look relatively simple. That’s until you start to work through complexities such as differing property rules, multiple lenders, multiple securities and self-employed affordability criteria.
“We’ve worked with Together before, supporting other high-net-worth clients with complex property finance requirements, so we had full confidence that they could deliver the right result here.”
Both loans were structured on a rolled-up interest basis, allowing the couple to defer monthly interest payments and repay all accrued interest on the sale of their former home or the refinance of their vacant English property.