Age limits on mortgages are one of those things nobody thinks about until they hit one.
You ring up about a buy-to-let mortgage, everything looks fine, and then somewhere in the small print there’s a number that rules you out simply because of your date of birth.
The Mortgage Works, which is Nationwide’s buy-to-let arm, has just moved that number, and it’s worth knowing about even if you’re nowhere near retirement, because it tells you something useful about how these rules actually work.
From 3 September, The Mortgage Works raised the maximum age for a first-time landlord to apply from 70 to 75, as long as you’re borrowing up to 70% of the property’s value.
And if you’re an experienced landlord already, there’s now no maximum age at all for the same 70% limit.
Before this change, that no-age-limit deal only applied if you were borrowing up to 65% of the value, so this opens the door wider, not just by a few years, but at a higher borrowing level too.
There’s more in the same announcement. The most a landlord can now borrow across the whole Nationwide Group, which includes The Mortgage Works, Nationwide and Virgin Money, has gone up from £7.5 million to £10 million.
That’s aimed at bigger portfolio landlords who were starting to bump up against the old ceiling and couldn’t grow any further with this lender without going elsewhere.
And in a smaller but interesting change, The Mortgage Works will now let you buy a buy-to-let property from a family member, which it didn’t allow before.
If you’ve ever wanted to sell a rental property to a son, daughter or sibling rather than a stranger, that’s now possible with this lender in a way it wasn’t a few weeks ago.
There’s also a new, simpler form replacing the old paperwork required for limited company applications involving intercompany loans, which is a small thing on its own, but it’s one less headache if you invest through a company.
Here’s the point I’d actually take from all this.
Lending criteria aren’t fixed. They feel fixed, because when you’re told “no” it sounds final, and most of us don’t go back and ask the same question twice.
But lenders change these rules all the time, usually quietly, often because brokers keep telling them the same thing gets in the way of business they’d otherwise be happy to do.
If a lender turned you down a year or two ago because of your age, or because a family sale wasn’t allowed, or because you’d hit a borrowing ceiling, that answer might simply be out of date now. It costs nothing to ask again, and in this case it might be a straight “yes” where it was a flat “no” back in the summer.
This is exactly the kind of change that’s easy to miss if you’re not working with a broker who keeps track of it.
Criteria updates like this one don’t make the front pages the way a rate change does, but for you personally they can make a bigger difference, especially if age or portfolio size has been the actual thing standing between you and your next purchase.
A good broker will know which lenders have just loosened up and which ones still have the old rules in place, so you’re not wasting time applying somewhere that was always going to say no.
If you’re an older investor who assumed your buy-to-let days were numbered, or a portfolio landlord who’s been told you’re maxed out, this is worth a phone call. Not because the answer’s guaranteed to be different, but because the rules that gave you that answer last time may simply not apply any more.
By the way, if you don’t have a mortgage broker, or you’d like a second opinion, I’ll be very happy to put you in touch with my very good mortgage broker.
Just email me: thepropertyteacher@gmail.com and I’ll happily make the introduction.
Here’s to successful property investing.
Peter Jones
Author, property investor & ex-Chartered Surveyor
P.S. If you’d like a deeper dive into property investing based on the real-life experience of an investor who has built a substantial multi-property portfolio, my popular e-book, The Successful Property Investor’s Strategy Workshop, explains how I built my own portfolio from scratch and the principles that can help you do the same.
You can find out more here: https://thepropertyteacher.co.uk/the-successful-property-investors-strategy-workshop/
