Property
Buying, letting, refurbishing and developing British property. Stamp duty, yields, licensing, EPCs and the chain that collapses two weeks before exchange.
Buying, letting, refurbishing and developing British property. Stamp duty, yields, licensing, EPCs and the chain that collapses two weeks before exchange.
- Buying at auction, where the hammer is exchange. When the hammer falls you have exchanged. Everything you would normally do before committing has to happen in the fortnight before the sale.
- Bridging finance, and the clock it starts. Bridging is quoted by the month and priced like an emergency. It works when the exit is real, a date, and something you control.
- The stress test that decides whether you can borrow again. You have four flats and an offer on a fifth. The lender is not really assessing the fifth. It is assessing the four, at a rate nobody is charging you.
- Deposits, and the penalty for a week's delay. Thirty days is not a guideline. Miss it and a tenant can claim up to three times the deposit, and your possession notice stops working until you fix it.
- The certificates a letting cannot start without. One annual gas check, one five-yearly electrical report, and alarms on every storey. Miss the first and your possession notice is void before you serve it.
- The first month the rent does not arrive. The rent is eleven days late and the tenant has stopped replying. What you do in the next fortnight decides whether this costs you a month or most of a year.
- The neighbour's wall and yours. The builders are booked for the fourth. Your neighbour has just discovered the Party Wall etc. Act 1996, and the notice you never served runs for two months.
- Working on a listed building. Listed building consent covers the inside as well as the outside, and doing the work without it is a criminal offence with no time limit on enforcement.
- The bill that arrives after planning permission. Planning permission is not the end of the paying. CIL is charged per square metre and section 106 is negotiated, and together they can remove your whole margin.
- What might be under the site. The site is cheap because nobody knows what is under it. A desk study costs a few hundred pounds. Finding out after you own it costs considerably more.