Can I Get a Mortgage to Build My Own Home

The Government is wanting to offer up the opportunity to more families to have their own custom built home, one where you take up more of the building yourself and the government is willing to help you along. Grant Shapps, the Housing Minister, has called this new movement a "home building revolution" for the UK and he wants to remove the bureaucratic red tape that is hindering more people from building their own home. His goal is to make building your own property a popular choice for a family and he is working with the National Self Build Association to come up with a streamlined and strong system to support the effort.

The Government is behind this project to increase home building levels in the UK which currently are insufficient to meet demands. The focus of the project will be centered on three main factors involving building your own home and those are:

Availability of land including the transfer of unused public sector land to a house building property

Increasing the availability of house building financing

Increase availability of support to assure success in the self build

One major move in the right direction has been the Community Right to Build program that will remove the red tape of building to fast track a project to begin sooner. This program will require that a community come together to plan and build new housing developments. It can involve the renovation of unused buildings to housing as well as securing unused public land for the purpose of a community build. If the community shows overwhelming support for the project then it will have less governmental steps to complete and this will move it forward at a faster pace to completion.

In choosing to join the nearly 20,000 self build home projects per year, the first step will be finding the appropriate place to build. There are places to look for the right plot online and some are free while others are not. Those that charge have minimal fees and the extras that come with those fees will be beneficial in the search process such as listing alerts. There will also be more listings in a paid search site. One of the most popular is Plot Search at

www.buildstore.co.uk/findingland with a 3 month fee of £15 for membership or £30 for a year. The sites www.selfbuildland.co.uk and www.BuildingPlot.com are free to search for suitable plots.

When you decide where you want to build it is time to find the financing for the project. Unlike a traditional house lending where the money is handed over in bulk, with a self build the money is passed out as stages in the build are completed. There is also advance payment schemes where the money is paid out in advance and then once a stage is completed then money is given to complete the next stage. A broker can help in securing the right lender and situation for the self builder.

There are lenders that specialize in only self builds and one of the major ones is Buildstore. There are also lenders that have mortgage products geared toward the self builder and building societies are another good consideration to securing financing. As the government pushes the self build idea it is hopeful that even more self build mortgage products will come to the lending market. There are currently some that offer special lending products if the house build is eco-friendly. It takes a bit more effort to enter and complete a self build project, but the rewards can be worth it for the right person or family and the government hopes it will grow to be a serious consideration for more.