Mortgages and Planning Permission

So there we have it, our offer is accepted on the church and we have accepted an offer on our house. As usual in these things there is a chain. The people buying our house have sold theirs, to someone who has sold theirs to someone else. We are waiting for all the buyers to be in a postion to exchange contracts. Whilst we are waiting there are two vital things for us to do

• Organise a mortgage on a church
• Set about getting the planning permission for a change of use.

The Mortgage

I decided to ask a financial advisor to organise the mortgage, which he thought should be fairly straight forward having looked at some pictures of the church and reviewing our finances. We decided that it would not take more than a week to put this in place and we would deal with it a little closer to the time, once we knew we were closer to an exchange of contracts point.

Planning Permission

This would obviously be the most important thing to deal with. It would be no good at all to have bought a church and then found out that we could not get permission to convert it. As it was it had permission for use as a place of religious service or strangely enough a childrens day care centre! Additionally we knew that once we had got the planning permission we would have to move very quikly to ensure that we werent gazumped by a property developer as the church would be much more valuable once the planning permission was granted.

The first thing we did was to telephone the local planning office at the borough council. They advised us that they were aware of the property and that one planning application had been made previously that had been rejected. They said that in principal there was not a problem but they did have some reservations that needed to be addressed, these mainly related to space for parking and access to and from the property for vehicles.

We downloaded this rejected planning decision from the council website which would give us a clue to the problems. On reading through it, it became apparent that the applicant had wanted to convert the church to a commercial office building and the plans included a row of parking spaces across the front of the church with potentially several vehicles backing on to a busy road.

i then set about drawing up rough sketches of how the building could be converted, room layouts and a stairway to a newly created first floor. drawing and redrawing until we were sure of our layout. Then we could do no more, it was back to the waiting game. Everything had to be timed perfectly, we did not want to get planning permission before everything was settled with the sale of our house. We could not risk putting all the work in to get the permission, only for someone else to snap up the church with that vital permission before we were ready to commit to a mortgage.

We spent many weeks waiting for a sign of our sale completing but there was nothing, we called the estate agents and were told that the bottom of the chain were trying to sort out their mortgage and to wait. Then in June 2006 we heard the bad news, the chain had fallen apart and our buyers were dropping out because their sale had fallen through. We actually took it reasonably well, taking the view that if it had meant to happen it would. But we werent giving up yet. We told the estate agents to get on and find another buyer for ours.