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As it’s the perfect time to be trying to buy a new house I was wondering what I might do that is even more fun.
So, I’ve managed to find two houses for sale that are next door to each other and look like they were originally one bigger house. Does anyone have experience of trying to buy two houses and recombine them into a single dwelling? Specifically would a mortgage lender go anywhere near this sort of thing and how much faff is it trying to get things set back up as a single entity once you do own both?
or would I be better off just going to find something sharp to poke in my eyes?
I'd imagine that you'd have to get two separate mortgages, one for each existing property.
Once you'd turned them into one dwelling, I'd guess that you'd need to get land registry to recognise it as one dwelling.
But then you'd probably have to remortgage against just the one property. Which would be fun as I'd imagine that the value of the one bigger property would be less than the two separate properties.
So if it was me and I could afford two mortgages, then keep it as two separate properties officially but carry out the physical conversion.
You'd still be paying two lots of council tax, and unless you merge all the services (water, gas and electric) you'd have two sets of bills. For gas and electric there's a minimum standing charge, so you'd be paying that twice unless you told gas and electric you want them turned off on one property and splice them together, which you may or may not be able to do depending on the amperage of your incoming connection, I think ours is 80A as it's old, for example.
If you did go for the keeping it as two separately registered properties but carry out physical work to combine them, then it would be a nightmare when it comes time to sell. So that would be fun for you, or your executors if you live there for the rest of your life.
Edit: As you may have gathered this is all guess work on my part and I've never done it, so probably not the best person. But it sounds kinda fun 😆
Friends did it, and didn't seem overly onerous. They owned and lived in one and when their neighbour sold (died or moved into care IIRC) they bought the next door and 2 semi's became one large detached. Not exactly sure what the mortgage situation was - pretty sure they already owned theirs outright and bought the second on a mortgage. Talk to a broker, I guess.
https://www.reallymoving.com/help-and-advice/guides/can-you-convert-two-properties-into-one
Unless both properties were split really badly and as a result they are hugely compromised and no one wants to buy them...isn't this just a much harder and slower version of throwing several suitcases packed full of cash into a bottomless well?!
(I jest, perhaps you've done the sums and/or have decided it's cost effective against buying a larger property in the first place)
Everything will have to comply to current buildings regs.
Could get expensive and messy.
I looked into doing it but the council was dead-set against anything that reduced available housing stock.
Im assuming, if bought as 2 separate properties, that one of them would have to be treated as a second home so higher stamp duty and maybe less mortgage options
The very first thing I'd do is take to a mortgage advisor. When I moved house, the old place was bought by my next-door neighbours. It took forever to go through because they couldn't get a mortgage when already owning an adjacent property.
Where I live now is two modest-sized terraces converted into one big one, so it's definitely doable but not a task I'd envy. If the place(s) you're looking at have already been converted once then you might have a head start here, but consider that you'll almost certainly want to combine gas and electricity systems, central heating (and an uprated boiler to drive it all), wiring... cost aside you're probably going to have to take everything to bits. What are you going to do with two kitchens?
Then there's red tape. This place was formerly some sort of care home, which meant it was something like a Type 4A dwelling rather than a regular Type 4. I had to have it reclassified (which frankly baffled me, what are they going to do, penalise me for not having a mandatory minimum number of disabled adults in here?) It wasn't particularly difficult, just one more thing that I hadn't thought about.
We bought the other half of our semi detached when the neighbours moved in 2017 and converted it into a single dwelling.
We could do this through both having legacies arriving at the right time ( although we would both rather not have been in that position if you see what I mean) so no issue with mortgage.
We had no problem from the council and didn’t need planning permission- we paid for a pre-planning judgement to get a formal advice letter from the planning department to confirm this. We did of course have to get building regs. Both houses needed new boilers and our original half needed rewiring so the additional cost for the combining the two was not significantly greater that we would have had to pay soon anyway. One strange anomaly of the tax system is that much of the work was 5% VAT rated which helped the finances considerably, but as the house had never been one dwelling and wasn’t a re-conversion I am not sure if this would apply to your situation
We did have to pay for second home stamp duty which is not refundable when two properties are combined. Getting Council tax adjustment was also remarkably easy as as soon as the two kitchens had been knocked into one- the assessor was on the premises for about 15 minutes to confirm that it had been done.
Whether it was sensible financially is another matter - a local estate agent informally suggested we wouldn’t loose out but other people thought we were nuts- but as we had been looking for somewhere else for ages and hadn’t found anything suitable locally and we have no intention of moving anytime soon we don’t regret doing it. I guess that’s partly because we regard it as primarily a home we both enjoy and not as an investment that we happen to live in.
Would be amazed if it didn't lose you a bunch of money almost instantly, even before the cost of building works came into it.
I suspect this is a bit of a non starter for us if I’m thinking about it with my rational hat on. Not worth the effort or risk for a house in a place we aren’t super keen on.
If we are ignoring the fact that getting two mortgages and paying up all the associated taxes would be a bit of a ball ache (say for a developer looking for cash purchase) I think you could just about make this work. The two individual houses are up for £270,000 and £170,000 and a house the same size/type/location as the recombined one (in good nick) would likely fetch north of £600,000 round this way. However, I suspect both places would need completely stripping back to their basic fabric so they could be fitted out from scratch to make them desirable and safe. So might not leave much room for any profit.
I am looking for a house and have seen 2 flats for sale (upstairs and downstairs in a terraced house) so I'm finding this thread useful.
I kind of guesstimated new electrics and CH but every door a fire door would be a pain esp. as part of the attraction is the original features.
DNO will take a dim view of two supplies into one premises.
They’ll be fairly straightforward about disconnecting one though.
The two individual houses are up for £270,000 and £170,000 and a house the same size/type/location as the recombined one (in good nick) would likely fetch north of £600,000 round this way.
I have to say that sounds a little unusual, but you could get a valuation of the proposed recombined house from a surveyor to qualify your thinking
The two individual houses are up for £270,000 and £170,000 and a house the same size/type/location as the recombined one (in good nick) would likely fetch north of £600,000 round this way. However, I suspect both places would need completely stripping back to their basic fabric so they could be fitted out from scratch to make them desirable and safe.
By way of comparison, I paid less than the lower of those two prices for what is a five-bedroom house in total.
My Dad did it in the early 00's. Sort of. Two sizeable flats in an old Victorian house, 2 bed downstairs, 3 bed duplex upstairs, massive shared curved staircase/entry hall. The council/planning etc was the easy bit, trying to get builders to do the work was far harder. Lot's of knocking through walls and making good but some of the features needed keeping. Even taking the upstairs kitchen out was fairly straight forward as most of the services were fed in through the kitchen in the flat below and then out to the relevant meter. He ended up doing a lot of it himself. Sold the finished product for about a million quid (it overlooks the Stray in Harrogate, think it was just off York Place.) Which was about 400k more than he'd paid, total.
Also, an ex colleague did it, kept buying his elderly neighbours properties. Bought the 2nd cottage in a row of 4 when he was fresh out of Uni and needed somewhere to live (mid/late 80s), bought the 1st in the row when the original owner went into a home (had to completely gut it) then the 4th that he had as a rental property for a few years until the 3rd came up. So he (and his wife) turned 4 small, two up, two down workers cottages into a nice 4 bed family home with a massive garden. That's not far from Coventry. No idea how profitable it'll be, as he's still there now. 40 years and 3 kids later.
Did this with a house in Musselburgh that was split in the 70's and originally was one. We lived upstairs, neighbour downstairs died and we put it back to one property.
Cost to consider:
Architect, no plans were available previously. Most expensive single cost.
Council and building control. All the work must meet current regs for the whole property
Rewire whole property
New boiler and C/h
Remove lead piping from the street and into the house
Council: reverted to a single address easily, no big deal
Mortgages. The trickiest. Applied to NatWest to put it all on one mortgage and even though we told them our plan to combine the two, "because it had 2 kitchens it couldn't be done even though one will be removed" wtaf... so two mortgages with the same provider, it was.
When it was split in the 70's it was done carefully and respectfully to stairs etc etc and we uncovered some great preserved Victorian features as we uncovered and rebuilt.
On selling, the Solicitor did the best job of bringing the titles to one deed and closing the two mortgages. It was simple. In our case as we did a lot of the labour working with the trades, we did very well on the sale.
Interesting project and I would do it again.