You can get mortgages to buy foreign properties and holiday homes, but any advantage you are receiving with the current weakness of sterling may disappear quite quickly and if sterling returns to its previous levels you may find over the full term of the mortgage that you end up paying more
Is that the only catch though, I am assuming there are few options in relation to interest rates? Thnaks for your previous response carl and for anyone else who comes on to the thread in advance.
I don't know, but please share any updates as I have a GBP mortgage for a property in UK & would like to convert to a Euro mortgage now that the Euro is strong, so as to benefit on the GBP sale in the future, in anticipation that GBP will recover in 2-3 years time.
Are you asking your tenants to pay rent in Euros now? Will you be able to sell the house in Euros?
If not aren't you running a risk that you have a monthly debt in euros and a monthly income in sterling, and if sterling weakens further then you may not be able to make the monthly mortgage payment?
And if the currencies suddenly go the opposite direction to how you expect, how do you adjust your mortgage terms in time to match so that you can still pay off the loan?
Remember the day that sterling dropped out of ERM? I certainly do. I earned my salary in Sterling and had my main costs in Deutschmarks. That was not a good combination. See the graph for how fast currencies can turn against you. http://www.fxuniversal.com/images/bank-of-england-england-col.gif 15% in a couple of weeks.
Currency plays are a mugs game in my humble opinion. So I now normally try to handle everything in the native currency if at all possible.
Here's an old BBC article from 2002 on the subject http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1738296.stm Notice that they were saying it would be a disaster if the rates moved to 70p, never mind the current 90p.
Thnaks for the responses guys some good points made. The last reply did make me think alright I think you'd want to be able to pay a very big deposit then to take into account possible weakness of the pound in future.