Holiday Home Mortgages – Don’t Give Up On Your Dream

Holiday home mortgages, like most types of finance, are thinner on the ground at the moment than they were a year ago. However, the dream of owning a holiday home is as strong as ever among most of the population. If this is your dream, don’t give up. If you make a determined effort you can find the finance you need.

If your intention is to buy a holiday home for the use of yourself and your family, rather than as a business, you can look for holiday home mortgages on the same basis as the mortgage on your first home. However, even now when property prices are falling, prices of holiday homes in the real UK holiday hotspots like Devon and Cornwall, the Lake District, or the South Coast may well be out of your reach.

So what are your alternatives?

• Look for a holiday home in areas that are less obvious holiday spots, but still delightful. House prices in some really beautiful areas like the Yorkshire Wolds, Northumberland, or the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire hadn’t really taken off before the downturn, and you should be able to find some attractive properties at very affordable prices. Of course, with the current shortgage of finance you will still have to make sure you are at the front of the queue to get hold of what holiday home mortgages are on offer. This means, among other things, a perfect credit record, and a good sized deposit.
• Club together with friends or other family members. This makes a lot of sense, as you can’t occupy your holiday home all year round. From the financial point of view this makes it a lot easier to obtain holiday home mortgages and to get the deposit together. But of course you do have to to be careful whom you choose to join up with. They need to be people you trust and people you get on with well. You don’t want squabbles about who gets the Easter holiday slot, or who caused a flood by leaving the bath tap on, to spoil your enjoyment of your holiday home. And bear in mind that if any party defaults on the payments, the other parties – i.e. you – are liable for the mortgage debt.
• Try looking for a non-standard holiday property, such as a holiday park home or a log cabin. These are much cheaper to buy than a thatched cottage in Devon, but are usually in stunning locations and make delightful holiday homes. They do have pros and cons. Among the pros are that they don’t need doing up, as a holiday cottage almost certainly would do – they are ready to walk into. Plus they are managed, so you don’t have to worry about your property when you’re not there. The cons? You can usually only buy a lease, not the freehold. And although nowadays holiday home mortgages are available on these properties, lenders are not really that keen.

From all the doom and gloom that assails us every day in the media, you could be tempted to believe that your dream of owning a holiday home has to go on hold. Not so. Holiday home mortgages may be harder to find, but they are still available. For your best chance of finding one, talk to us.