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Decided I’d pay the extra and get a 5yr deal rather than two but now we’ve decide to move late this year / early next; about half way through. Mortgage is a portable with Nat West.
I suspect this happens often but thought I’d consult the Hive and see if anyone will share their experiences, good or bad?
IME they will find an excuse why you can't port it. But the new offering will match existing. Presumably they pocket some hidden commission.
I took advice off a broker to this extent just this last week. We were looking to move ASAP, but a lack of suitable (affordable!) houses on the market right now has meant we've decided to stay put another 12-24 months, so we needed to remortgage as we're out of contract.
I asked my broker is there such a thing as an "easily portable" mortgage... His response was that for the mostpart, yes... Some lenders don't like it, some will find excuses not to, but most will be more than happy to port your mortgage as long as you're moving to a bigger/more expensive house. If you're downsizing, you will usually have to pay a penalty on the difference, as you would if you cut your mortgage short.
Dunno how much you're borrowing, but we are in the 75% LTV bracket now, and the best deal we could get (through the broker, was better than we could get direct so he was well worth the £295 he charged amortised over 5 years!) was with Nationwide @ 1.69% with a £999 up front fee rolled in (worked out about £1.50 per month cheaper than the Halifax @ 1.79% with no fee up front). Oh, and Nationwide valued our house £10k higher than Halifax did too, so though that wasn't a major constraint for us, it could have been if we were closer to the LTV bracket boundary.
This is the guy I used... Was recommended to me by a number of other people I know.
We lost out hugely trying to port a NatWest mortgage. They refused to port as part of garden was claimed under adverse possession, having been left unregistered when the houses were built.
We were so fed up living where we were we took the hit and paid an early repayment charge.
I kept complaining even after we had moved and eventually NatWest said we could port - obviously no use to us and flat refusal to refund ERC. Took it to ombudsman who agreed NatWest were wrong they had made good by offering the port. I appealed that with Ombudsman but was knocked back, mental stuff.
My only advice is to nail NatWest to a wall if they are dicks about anything.
This is the guy I used… Was recommended to me by a number of other people I know.
Funnily enough we are going through a purchase at the moment, also using Steve - he has been incredibly helpful all the way through, so a second recommendation here.
We moved with a fixed Natwest portable mortgage a few years ago. As it was fixed they would'nt let us borrow more on the same mortgage so we ended up having a 2nd Natwest mortgage for the difference between the house value and the fixed mortgage.
It was a bit of a pain to sort out but less of a pain than the penalty for ending the fixed rate early.
We talked to our bank (Santander) about exactly this yesterday. They seemed more than happy to let us port our mortgage (2 year fixed term with roughly 9 months left on the fix) but this may well have been on the basis that we are looking to borrow more money.
When we moved c 20 years ago we were able to port our Britannia mortgage (a 5year fixed we'd started less than 12 months previously) with no hassle. Probably helped that as @mboy said we were buying a more expensive house so taking additional funding.
Are you Italian? 🤪
We've moved repeatedly with Nationwide with fixed term accounts and have always ported the mortgage to the new property without any problems at all.
The only problem is that additional borrowing goes on another account so you get more sheets of paper in the annual statement.
Ask Natwest.
Our company said we'd take an additional, seperate mortgage to cover the extra for the new house. That effectively meant we'd be locked into them for the foreseeable as the two terms would not match up!
So we decided to wait until the deal ended, go on SVR and then move and get a fresh deal elsewhere.
Busy day so no chance to come back here, but thanks for the responses.
Well, if we can, we’ll be going from our first family home to what we hope will be our family home for the foreseeable - so deffo borrowing more unless we get a windfall. I suspect we’ll need to straighten our finances and tighten our belts to improve affordability and hope the house value doesn’t drop so we can max equity.