Q My husband and I have recently sold our first home in the south-east and now have £300,000 in our bank account. We would like to buy a beautiful property farther north for the agreed price of £380,000. It is a three-bedroom flat that is over two floors in the top half of a Georgian house (it includes an attic conversion) with its own private entrance. However, there are complications: first, it is Grade I-listed; second, it seems the seller, who converted it from one single non-domestic building to three separate properties (there is a flat and a proposed cafe downstairs), failed to get a conversion warranty (he didn’t know this was required).
The first bank we approached (for an £80,000 mortgage) said the property was not mortgageable because of the lack of the conversion warranty (apparently the fact that the seller bought the property more than 10 years ago and has been converting it without living in it means that the warranty is required). The seller then bought a retrospective warranty, and we approached a mortgage broker. However, the mortgage broker has been unable to find a lender who will consider the property mortgageable: some lenders are happy with a Grade I-listed property, some are happy with a retrospective warranty but none, it seems, are happy with both.
