We will be moving back to the UK in 2-3 years time, and was just wondering what do you do about getting a mortgage after being away for years. We will have lived in Aus for 4-5 years by the time we move back.

My concern is that after all that time, we will have no credit rating in the UK and therefore people would be reluctant to lend us.
It might sound silly, but would they not look at your credit history in Aus?

And if expats do have to build up a credit history again, how long would that have to be?

Has anybody experienced this or has any advice?

Have you considered renting for a few years? www.rightmove.co.uk has loads of property for rent or buy.. dontheturner

I agree. House prices aren't going up in the next 2-3 years (and might continue to go down) so I'd say unless you are sure you will stay in (wherever you return to) for 5 years, it's probably not worth buying for at least a year or two.

We've just got a UK mortgage after 15 years away and we don't even live there yet.

Lending is certainly tighter than it used to be, and we paid through the nose in terms of fees, but we got a very low rate.

The main concern of the lenders is that you can afford to pay the mortgage. So, in our case, we provided evidence of incomings (salary) and outgoings and they were happy to lend us money (and more than we asked for).

So I don't think credit history came into it.

However, I should mention that we have always retained a UK bank account, and have been paying UK funds into two of those horrible endowment schemes (no longer connected to a mortgage) since the mid-eighties, so maybe that had something to do with it.

We got a UK mortgage and put an offer in on a house 7 months before we moved back to UK from Bermuda. It was great to have our own house to go to when we arrived back. We had to show proof of future UK earnings (hubby was transferring back) and we got the mortgage with the bank we maintained an account with.

Thanks for that, it's good to hear that you had no problems.

We have kept our UK bank account open also, so that's a bonus.

I believe, at the end of the day, it is up to individual lenders to decide if you are credit worthy or not. If you bank with the HSBC, upon returning the UK, you can open an account without a problem and have access to all of their services, including mortgages. I recently applied to buy a house cash in the UK after an absence of 30 years and the builder was doing his best to try and pursuede me and take out a mortgage. No doubt he was thinking of his fat commission.

I can confirm from recent experience that if you go down the rental route, the agents will almost certainly do a credit check via somewhere like experian. They are looking for a history of defaults so if you have none of these you should be fine. More problematic can be recent employment history; if you have no job to return to, be prepared to pay a few months rent upfront or get a uk-based friend/relative to act as a guarantor