Irish Person Moving To UK and Looking For Mortgage To Buy First Home

I suspect most will give you the same answer. You might have to consider borrowing through an irish bank, or perhaps there is a an irish bank with UK branches? I recall several years ago I had a couple of friends in England who had got mortgages through irish banks (because of a better interest rate or exchange rate at the time).

You might want to try one of the Irish banks that deal in the UK, such as FirstActive (*spit*). In fact, your own bank might well be able to exchange information with its UK arm, given that most of them have some UK trading presence.

Yeah, but they tend to charge extortionate interest rates to compensate for (what they perceive as) the additional risk. Avoid, unless you're totally out of options.

I'd suggest that your best choice might be to talk to a UK mortgage broker, who can do all the work for you, and gets a commission from the lender. Don't have any recommendations, though, I've never had to use one.

Jon

Given that FirstActive is part of the Royal Bank Of Scotland Group, surely it's a UK bank which deals in Ireland!

In message id on 2 Feb 2005 21:14:56 -0800, Ronan Mc Grory wrote in uk.finance :

If you can lay your hands on a chunk of the £26 million withdrawn from the Northern Bank in Donegall Square in Belfast just before Christmas, you might find yourself in a strong position to borrow at reduced / zero cost and disperse funds through acquisitions in the over priced English housing market.

Withdrawals of that size barely buy you a bachelor pad in Kensington nowadays.

I bloody wish.

A while ago, I was dealing with Probate in my late mother's estate. She had had a couple of accounts with them. About a month after her death, I got a letter saying something like this:

"Dear Executor, we're withdrawing from the UK savings market. We'll not be paying any more interest, as of less than a month from now, but you won't be able to move the money out of the accounts until you've got Probate, however long that takes. Oh, and you'll shortly have to deal with our Dublin headquarters, since we'll be relocating the funds there. Sorry for the inconvenience, and all that."

I won't go through the next few months, except to nore that they wouldn't do any business by email, so it all had to be done by exchange of postal mail -- think 1-2 weeks *each way* -- and they were painfully bureaucratic (reminded me of stories of the stubborn Indian Civil Service in the times of the Raj). I didn't have anything like the same problems with any of the UK companies I dealt with, even the worst ones.

Can't see me putting any more business their way. Apart from a genuine aversion therapy, I'd be scared witless that they'd pull the accounts back to Dublin, just as they did with savings, and I'd be dealing with a mortgage with a company that takes a fortnight or more to correspond with. (As I'd commented to others, I could have *walked* and ferried the damn letters to Dublin in the time the British and Irish post offices took to get them there.)

So, you see, First Active isn't exactly my favourite banking institution.

Jon

AIB springs to mind.

Another option is to buy using a true[1] buy-to-let mortgage, although there may be other checks that render this route impossible. Lenders don't check who actually occupies the property.

Daytona

This has to be made up ?

A troll. If he had done the research he said, he'd know about non-status mortgages.