The cost of re-mortgaging a house

There are generally two reasons why people re-mortgage. They might do this to get a better mortgage deal from a different lender or they might do this to release some of the capital tied up in their house.

The process of re-mortgaging involves some of the aspects of a sale and some of the aspects of a purchase. We will now outline what’s involved in the cost of re-mortgaging a house.

Our fee for re-mortgage work is £450 (exclusive of VAT). That means the cost to you is £540 (including VAT).

This fee covers all the legal work we will do for you and which we will outline later.

Our fee is only part of the cost of re-mortgaging a house. There are additional costs involved. Some of these costs will vary, depending on a number of factors. We have no control over these costs. If you’re re-mortgaging a house, you will have to pay these charges. If someone only gives you a note of the fee for the legal work, the actual costs are likely to be more!

The additional costs of re-mortgaging a house

Re-mortgaging a house attracts a set of specific additional costs. These additional costs can vary depending on the location of the property and the range of reports required.

We will now provide an example of costs when you re-mortgage a house.

How can these additional costs vary?

* This is a combined cost of a local authority search, title search and Coal Report instructed through independent Searchers. This provides two of the reports we need to send to the purchaser’s solicitors as part of the conveyancing process. In addition, we may need to order a plans or other searches to send to the purchaser’s solicitors.

What’s involved in the re-mortgage process?

A property re-mortgage is a process which we will lead you through to successfully remove the Standard Security (charge) held over your house by your current lender and replace it with a new Standard Security (charge) over your house in favour of a new Lender. There are essential steps we must take to achieve this. These are:

• Take your instructions and giving you advice
• Carrying our anti-money laundering checks to comply with regulations
• Ordering up and checking the title to your house
• Ordering and checking various reports and searches
• Preparing the Standard Security in favour of your new lender
• Explaining the content of the Standard Security to you and having it executed
• Preparing the Discharge of the Standard Security in favour of your existing lender and having this executed by the Lender
• Ordering loan funds from your new lender
• Redeeming your mortgage
• Sending the Standard Security in favour of your new lender for registration in the Registers of Scotland
• Sending the Discharge for registration in the Registers of Scotland
• Confirming completion and accounting to you

Are there circumstances where the fee might increase?

Our fixed price fee covers all of the steps we’ve outlined above. However, there can be some circumstances where additional work is required. There may be issues of title to be resolved or problems with alterations or additions made to the property. There may be a problem with the property boundaries or some adverse notice issued by the local authority. These are just some of the problems you might face when re-mortgaging a house. On occasions, the nature and complexity of the problem means that significant additional work is required to rectify the problem.

In such circumstances, we will explain the problem to you as soon as we find out about it. We will let you know whether we expect to resolve this within the fixed fee price we’ve quoted. If the work is of such a nature that it will take considerable additional time or is of a complex nature, we will advise you of the additional likely cost to resolve the issue and fix the problem.

Some additional issues regularly appear in purchase transactions and we are able to advise of the additional charges required to resolve these. The following items attract the charges set beside them:

Where we need to carry out additional work for you and if it does not appear in the table above, we will charge a time-based fee. The level of fee charge will depend on who deals with this work for you. Here are our current rates per hour for the different categories of fee earner in our firm:

If you would like more information or a detailed breakdown of the cost of your re-mortgage, please contact us.