commander

Hi, long time member, been inactive since i left MENA in 2014 and moved to Houston. I have property in Scotland which I rent out. the property is mortgage free. Im looking to release some equity to help fund the purchase of another property in the UK.
Does anyone have any contacts or advice on how best to approach this. I still have a UK bank account where my rental revenue goes into. I am a full time US resident (green card). My previous mortgage on the property was through Lloyds TSB in Hong Kong, specifically for expats but that product was discontinued a long time ago.
Ideally i want to keep the UK finances completely separate from my US finances.
any help or pointers would be gratefully received. As an idea, the property is worth around 190K GBP and i would be looking to free up around 40K GBP.
thanks

angelman

I can only say that I remortgaged a rental property I had in London albeit several years ago. For years I was afraid of telling the mortgage company I was a) out of the country and b) that I was renting it. In the end I decided to go legit as it were. I used to have a Woolwich tracker mortgage which got bought by Barclays. I called up Barclays and they were more than happy to remortgage to a new tracker mortgage. I got an incredible 0.49% above base rate which at that time was about 4% so I was paying 4.49% interest. As interest rates got lower and lower so did my mortgage. Barclays seemed to have no issue with my foreign location nor my renting it. I did the rental management through a managing agent to keep everything simple. My current mortgage rate is about 0.49%!! As a resident of the US your UK finances are NEVER separate from your US finances. You are declaring that rental income on your US taxes right.. if you have a bank account/s in UK that total > $10,000 you are declaring them on FBAR forms right??!!! I would just call up Barclays as a start and see what they offer. I took out 100k in equity and was lucky enough to take advantage of the 2 to1 exchange rate at the time so turned 100,000 GBP into $200,000 just on the exchange rate! Those were the days.