Purchasing property abroad
 

Just got back from visiting my Mum who lives abroad. Whilst I was there some friends of hers are thinking of purchasing another property. Prices for property at the moment look excellent compared to the UK and it got me thinking.

I'm going to pop into the Halifax this weekend but I just wanted to send out a post and see what people's first thoughts would be.

Basically I currently don't own any property so this would be my first mortgage. I'd be looking for something in the region of 60k.

Would I be able to get a mortgage for this or would the fact it's my first house and also that it's abroad be a major problem? I was thinking about stuff like surveys where this would be difficult for the lenders to assess the property etc

The house is based in Cyprus.

Anyone got any thoughts or done this before?
Just saves me thinking about it too much before the weekend and not getting any sleep :)

Cheers for the link, had a read but I'm not sure most of that would apply to Cyprus.

People have been buying property in Spain for years, I don't think Cyprus has really thought too much about foreigners buying their property so the red tape is a lot less.

Certainly when I spoke to my Mum's friends (who already own 1 property) they said the process was fairly straightforward. The did recommend it would be better to get the mortgage from a UK lender and I was wondering how easy this would be to accomplish...

go in somewhere and ask then or ring a morgage company.... cant be hard ;)

I suspect (just guessing here) that it would be far easier if you had a UK property. You could effectively guarentee the Cypriot property against the equity in your UK property.

shouldn't be a big problem. Woolwich now have an entire department devoted to purchasing abroad so you could try them as well. Mortgages for purchases abroad are usually on a shorter term (10-15 years) and usually limited to 75% LTV

As far as I'm aware, the English have been buying up Cyprus for years but I may wrong. Just Google up UK banks in Cyprus and ask them but I would have thought that a local mortgage would be better unless the Cypriot Pound is pegged against Sterling you could run into problems with exchange rates.

Yeah will go into one of the lenders (probably Halifax as it's closer) this weekend.

Done a few googles and like fast bloke has said the lending period is short term which could be an issue unless I rented it out.

Going to have to give this some serious thought...