Flat conversion and financing strategy

Flat conversion and financing strategy

10:08 AM, 29th August 2014, About 10 years ago 11

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Let me first take this opportunity to thank Mr Mark Alexander and team for creating this excellent encyclopaedia for landlords. I have decided to venture into converting house into flats.

We are in process of converting a 3 bed semidetached house into 3 one bed flats. I have enough equity to cover this conversion. I am looking to keep all the flats as buy to let and not planning to sell.

I wonder what would be the best financing strategy to release maximum equity: a multi-unit property mortgage from commercial lender or creating new leases and get a standard buy to let.

The house without conversion is valued at £500k and each flat will be valued around 300k.

Many thanks for your help.

Sonnyflat conversion


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Annette Stone

16:19 PM, 29th August 2014, About 10 years ago

Thanks for the recommendation Mark. Apart from being a managing agent as you know I buy and/or develop flats and if I were Sonny I would sell the ground floor flat if it has a garden as that is likely to be the most valuable flat. Selling one will also reduce the maintenance costs as creating individual leases will mean that each flat pays a specific amount of the costs of maintaining the building, including insurance and any structural repairs. If the ground floor flat is larger than the others and has use of a garden you could make the split 40% to the ground floor and then divide the other 60% between the other two flats. When you sell the ground floor you would create a leasehold for 99 or 125 years and you could charge a modern ground rent of around £200 per year doubling every 25 years so you do actually also have a long term investment. My strategy would be to use the money realised from the sale of the ground floor flat to fund the next development of three flats and then keep on doing the same thing. That way you will build up a portfolio of buy to lets and a portfolio of freeholds side by side. Final point, most lenders will be happy to lend on two or three flats within the same building it is when you get either to five in the case of some of the big banks or eight in the case of some building societies that the going gets tough. Hope this is useful; good luck

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