Experience is the best teacher, as the saying goes. And I learned a hell of a lot with this one! At the time, purchasing this property got me tearing my hair out, but as soon as I’d completed I was a much more confident investor. I felt lighter. I was happy. This is the story of the house that took a year to buy.

I was introduced to this house by a sourcer. Out of a bunch of houses that didn’t meet my criteria, this was the one. The sourcer didn’t know it at the time, but the day he took me around the six houses we had lined up, I was breaking up with my boyfriend. I was damn well gonna buy a house that day.

The house was the deceased estate of an elderly couple whose family had been through an emotional probate quite recently. You can see here (spoiler alert, I bought it in the end) that it was large, empty and had been untouched for decades. Perfect. The house had been on for £115,000 but eventually reduced to £100,000, which is where I had my offer accepted. This was to be a conversion of a 3-bed family home into a 5-bed co-living house. All seemed fine, but nothing went to plans a, b or c with this one. Here’s the chain of events and what I’ve come to know from each.

This is a no holds barred account. You won’t believe some things in here, but I’m sharing in the name of you learning from me learning the hard way.

Bad financial advice. My broker at the time advised me to get a BTL mortgage on this purchase in order to complete and do the works. He said that it was breach of product terms and my choice to take his advice, but by the time I had completed the renovation and refinance I would be safely on to an HMO product. I took the ‘professional advice’. I take responsibility for that. Only the survey revealed that the property a) was only worth £80,000 and b) wasn’t in a let-able condition (although it had a working kitchen and was watertight) and needed some works first. That lead to…
Split scope of works. I agreed with the build team to do part of the work up front to get it let-able and then the majority of the conversion post-completion. This included a £12,000 scope of works to damp, electrics and the 3rd party wall. This relied on…
Exchange with delayed completion. I first had to educate the agent on what this was; the branch manager had never heard of it. Once on board, she was able to get the vendor on board, too. Win. After first negotiating a new sale price based on the significant down valuation, we then managed to persuade the vendor to use this structure for exchange with 6 months to complete (which I thought was excessive at the time). This needed…
Contracts. Drawing up the contracts for exchange with delayed completion was painful. They had ridiculous clauses around things like keys access which wouldn’t have enabled the build team to make the improvements, but after about a month, we got there. We exchanged. Celebratory gin. This allowed us to do…
Phase 1 build. This was to complete the lender’s specified improvements. Which we did. It took 3 weeks. But then when the surveyor came round, the project manager told him about the plans for the conversion to HMO. At the BTL survey. So that was the collapse of finance route #1. That led to…
The bridging process. I was referred to my new broker who I then met at a networking. I was impressed and knew he’d be able to help me. To cut a long story short, I went through the whole bridging process but it collapsed right at the end when we realised there was no title plan registered for the property. A particular problem as the house has a flying freehold. The BTL lender had been happy to exchange without it, but the bridging company wasn’t. I totally understand this and broker was shocked I’d been able to exchange in the first place. This was a problem – no bridger was going to lend without a registered title (I spoke to a few) and I’d now decided well against the dishonest BTL route. This lead to…
The title register process. Now, I couldn’t register the title myself as I didn’t yet legally own the property. I’ve only exchanged at this point. I managed to persuade the vendor to do another thing he wasn’t expecting or educated on – registering the title. After much resistance and against advice from his solicitor he agreed, based on the fact that every buyer would have this issue and I would pay his legals. Cue celebratory gin. With HM Land Registry saying the process could take 11 weeks and me now having only 10 to complete, the race was on. But then a few weeks passed and nothing was moving from the vendor’s side. It turned out that the vendor brother and sister duo weren’t now communicating; one dealt with the solicitor and the other with the agent and everything was falling down in between. My contact believed that by agreeing via the estate agent, he was instructing his solicitor. So of course, nothing was happening. By this point, we were now 7 weeks out. Which led to…
Raising private finance. This was now the only way to take matters into my own hands. I knew that I couldn’t rely on the vendor, their solicitor or Land Registry for urgency and I was in the weak position of having paid the 10% deposit and initial scope of works for this house. I needed to crack on. This lead to…
Completing. Hurrah! I bloody did it. With 3 days to spare. If you want to know how, check out this blog. I’m pleased to say I have been the proud owner of the Title of this property since then.

In the meantime, here are my:

Ten top tips

Get an excellent power team. Me taking the bad advice of my first broker cost me double finance fees, a lot of time, nearly the deal and nearly a lot more money.
Do things properly. Cutting corners actually does the opposite and also costs more in the long run.
Never assume. I thought everyone knew how to work with a solicitor. I was wrong.
There’s always a way. If you don’t get the answer you want, ask someone else.
Relationships pay. The rapport I built with the agent, vendors and neighbours meant none of them gave up on me or the deal.
Contingencies are there for a reason. Time and cost contingencies are non-negotiable.
Plans A and B aren’t enough!
Be patient.
Phone a friend. If you invest on your own like me, having the right people at the end of the phone can be a great sounding board to work through challenges or keep you sane.
If you want something doing…

And if all else fails – gin! Cheers!

Paying forward some of the knowledge that was shared with me over this particular year, please ask me if you want to understand more about any of these steps, either just you or a as group. Good luck!