A correspondent wants to know how to go about taking sole ownership of a property she currently owns jointly and how much it’s likely to cost to remove her co-purchaser from the mortgage and deeds.

This is something I have personal experience of and, while I don’t want to depress anyone, I have to say the process was nowhere near as simple as you might expect.

When my husband and his first wife split up, even though he handed over his share of the former marital home as part of the divorce settlement, Halifax (why do my gripes always seem to be about Halifax?) refused to take his name off the mortgage.

Unfortunately, the admin fee it required – £160 – was the least of the problems.

Halifax said that because hubby’s ex-wife didn’t earn enough, she couldn’t take over the mortgage on her own.

So her new partner tried to add his name, but for some reason that was never fully explained, Halifax wouldn’t accept this.

For several years it insisted my hubby’s name remained on the mortgage for a house he no longer owned or paid for.

This, of course, meant he and I couldn’t buy together.

We could get a mortgage only on the basis of my salary, rather than our combined earnings, so the – very modest – house we could afford had to be bought solely in my name.

We’ve sorted things out now: his wife eventually sold up, cleared the old mortgage and moved on, and we were able to get a joint mortgage, but it was a long and stressful process.

So, getting back to my correspondent, I hope you find it easier to remove your co-purchaser from your mortgage than we did.

Provided your lender is happy that you can afford the mortgage alone, the actual process should be straightforward.

Fees for altering the mortgage paperwork will depend on your lender, but about £150 is typical.

The solicitor handling the transaction will deal with the deeds and may make a small additional charge for this.

(Of course, if your lender is especially mean it may treat this transaction as a whole new mortgage application, in which case the fees could run to several hundred pounds.)

There will also be a Land Registry charge for up-dating its records to reflect the transfer of ownership and change to the mortgage.

This will depend on the value of your mortgage – for loans of up to £100,000, it’s £40 and from £100,001 to £200,000, it’s £50.

Good luck - I’ve got my fingers crossed for you!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 4:43 pm and is filed under UK Personal Finance, ReMortgages. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.