Expat life: How to buy a home in Scotland*

(*not really a how-to guide of any sort)

The craziest thing just happened: we became the owners of our very own little piece of Edinburgh. It’s an old piece of an old building, tucked away in a corner of the Edinburgh New Town UNESCO World Heritage Site. It combines the wear and tear of an almost-200-year-old structure with the overlaid decor aesthetics of a 1970s-era DIYer, and it’s ours, all ours.  

Our mission to purchase a flat in Edinburgh started over a year ago (but was promptly put on hold by Scott’s cancer diagnosis). We’ve never owned property before, and hadn’t really considered it in any of our previous home cities. So why in Scotland? Part of it has to do with the homeowner-friendly culture here. In our two previous home countries (Germany and Switzerland) homeownership was simply less common. Here, like the US, it’s more popular and affordable to buy. Our situation of owning our own furniture yet renting a flat was highly unusual, as rentals mostly come furnished and with short leases. The other part of the decision to buy came from the fact that Edinburgh, unlike all our previous home cities, feels like a place we could stay for a long time. (To be fair Scott kind of felt that way about Munich, but I wasn’t quite convinced.)

We had been casually looking at places and learning our way around the Scottish home-buying process when we came across a flat we felt all tingly about. It was a decent size, in an excellent location, and offered a bit of a wow-factor in the form of sunset views over Edinburgh’s charming chimney pipes. We learned we had three days to decide whether we wanted to place a bid, and how much we were willing to pay. Panic ensued.

In Scotland, the process often goes like this. When you view a property you fancy, you tell your solicitor to note your interest with the selling solicitor. Once the sellers have received a few of these notes, they will set a closing date, by which all bids are due. These bids are completely blind, and you only get one shot. We agonized over how much to offer, changing our minds endless numbers of times before the 12 noon bid deadline. By 1pm, our bid had been accepted. We didn’t know it, but the hard part had not yet begun.

Before placing our bid, we met with a mortgage broker who took a quick look at our financials and told us we’d have no problem getting a mortgage. We specifically asked if our Americanness would pose any problems, and he heartily assured us it would not. So we were more than a little annoyed when his secretary called us back a few days after our bid was accepted to tell us that they couldn’t find a single bank willing to lend to us because we were in the UK on visas.

We approached several banks directly, and received an array of hope-followed-by-despair-inducing responses. Frustratingly, British banks often don’t seem to know their own policies when it comes to lending to foreigners, jerking us around so much that I can still feel the whiplash. Eventually we came across what is apparently the one and only UK bank that will lend to people here on visas. More back-and-forth jerking, lots of deposit-transfering from the US, and somehow it all came together.

Tangentially, for any expats out there looking to move large amounts of money from country to country, we can highly recommend Transferwise [affiliate link which will get you your first transfer free]. It seemed to offer much better net exchange rates than bank-to-bank transfers did. Moving money was probably the only part of this process which went smoothly.

So here we are, keys in hand, getting ready for our fast-approaching move date. The larger-than-expected deposit we had to put down in the end means that most of the work we want to do on the flat will have to wait for a while. In the meantime, we’ll have to be content with admiring the sunsets.