Mrs. Cad and I may be spending a year or two living the expatriate life in GB. In the US, it is nearly impossible to buy a house with less than stellar credit even with a down payment and a good job. Is it similar in GB?
It’s very similar here. And houses are much smaller and - in many cases - more expensive over here as well.
Beyond that, buying and selling takes a long time, so you may be better off renting.
With good credit, at a very minimum a 10% deposit (more if you don’t want to get screwed on rates) and don’t want to borrow more than 4 times joint income an individual will have no difficulty getting a mortgage.
How that works if you’re non-British and only going to be here a year or two I don’t know.
Adding in the costs of home purchase it will also be cheaper to rent if it’s for less than 2 years (ignoring potential house price rises).
That’s right - along with lawyer’s fees, you will have to pay Stamp Duty on your purchase - check out the rates here, so factor that in.
And a grand or so in mortgage arrangement fees, a few hundred (or more) in survey fees, estate agent fees when you then sell it…
Gee, most of us stopped doin’ that, ya know, back in 1776…
I believe it’s a bit tricky for non-EU citizens to get a mortgage. It might not be strictly prohibited, but most lenders will see it as a good excuse to turn you down (at least that’s the experience my girlfriend (American, living in uk, permanent residence visa) has had).
If you’re only going to be here for a couple of years, I’d suggest renting.
I’m working on the London War of Independence. Do you think chucking my Starbucks Coffee in the Thames will create a ripple?
The face that you have no intention of establishing permanent residence will likely hamper your efforts to get a mortgage. We have just purchased a home and the bank will not release the funds until hubby’s work permit is renewed. Which is why I am currently studying a whole lot of useless facts for the Live in the UK test for permanent residence :-(.
Stamp duty alone would put me off. It certainly is a lot higher than the land transfer taxes in Canada!
Only as the Thames chucks it back 
Si
Even assuming you can get a mortgage, it’s a bloody long, tedious process.
A friend of mine bought his house last year from another friend who was moving away. He had the money in the bank to pay her straight away, and she’d had a surveyor’s report done prior to putting it on the market. Even with both parties hustling the process along at every opportunity, it took 11 weeks from him making his offer to getting the keys.
Imho, if you’re staying less than 5 years and you’re not just trying to increase the value of a place to flip it, you’d be better off renting. Some landlords are more stringent than others about credit history, our first simply took a bond of 4 weeks rent, and 4 weeks rent in advance before having us sign the tenancy agreement, while our second made us get credit checks not just on ourselves, but our parents as guarantors (we were under 21) and gave us a 24 page contract to sign before we could move in.
I’ve only bought one house in the UK and it wasn’t that bad.
I had just returned from 13 years away, and the country had no record of my existence apart from my National Insurance number. This meant I had no credit history at all - it expires after 10 years. The credit industry in the UK cannot take into account people who lived overseas, so unless I could provide a UK postcode for addresses going back over the last five years, they simply couldn’t process me. I simply didn’t exist.
So I couldn’t get a bank account.
Why not? Because they require a credit check even when you’re not looking for credit. I had a perfect credit history in Ireland, but it was non-transferrable. I couldn’t get anything at all. Eventually I persuaded Natwest to give me a “step” account, which is designed for people who’ve just been let out of jail or something.
And yet, despite all this, I managed to get a mortgage for nearly £200,000.
This was 2006, mind you, when they were just throwing money at people to buy property. They didn’t seem to do any credit research at all - just asked for my payslips.
My ex confounded the vendor by offering the asking price at first view (it was our strategy - most people in the UK fuck around with dropping their offer and stuff), and getting the vendor to withdraw it from the market immediately. It then took six weeks between this, and us stepping through the door. All of that time was taken up by the lawyers, who delivered us a stack of seemingly pointless paperwork about the size of the Oxford Dictionary.
You’ll also get to learn about “gazumping”. Unlike in Canada, it’s perfectly acceptable to renege on a real estate deal at the last possible moment in England.
And gazundering too 
You don’t say where you are going so worth mentioning that the system of house purchase in Scotlandis completely different to that in England and Wales - no gazumping there. The problems with getting a mortgage will be the same though!
This looks like a good place to ask: are there a lot of single family houses in England, like here? Aside from the big houses (with names like “The Oaks, Little Upton”), do average people live in houses? All I know is from reading novels about life in England, but everyone seems to live in what I assume are apartments or row houses.
IMO (no stats to back this up), outside major cities, most people do live in houses rather than apartments. Usually terraced houses (I live in a terrace) or semi-detached in towns, detached or semi- in rural areas. These government statistics bear this out:
Note that “first floor” in the UK is “second floor” in the US - we say “ground floor” for what in the US is “first floor”. Also, apartments tend to be called “flats”.
Thanks, now I know what kind of dwellings Chief Inspector Wexford is always scoping out.