Anyone sold their house in the UK from abroad?

[Manks]

We may be forced to sell our UK house sooner rather than we had hoped and I wondered if anyone has sold their house from overseas? I realise it is going to make things harder, but just wanted to know what obstacles people had come across that wouldn't have occurred if you were in country.

[Dave in NZ]

We may be forced to sell our UK house sooner rather than we had hoped and I wondered if anyone has sold their house from overseas? I realise it is going to make things harder, but just wanted to know what obstacles people had come across that wouldn't have occurred if you were in country.

We sold our house while we are in New Zealand and we appointed our solicitor power of attorney. You can appoint a family member power of attorney to save costs but we decided to let our solicitor handle it. If you are not sure about this look here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_of_attorney

This is just to give you a rough idea as some of the items in Wikipedia are sometimes not 100% so check it out but it will give you an idea re this.Without doing this we would have found it very difficult as our house sale was not straight forward but hopefully someone will answer who had a straight forward sale and can advise you what they did

[nickiware]

Found it quite easy really as long as you have a solicitor you trust. We had to get the contracts signed in NZ with a NZ solicitor but it seemed quite straightforwards.

[YouMeAndThree]

We have not done it yet ourselves, but made my parents our PoA prior to leaving the UK for the very purpose. Will be interesting to read the ease (or not) that others have had doing the same thing.

[Manks]

Well, the conveyancer that we used to buy the house, and who has the deeds, has said that it should be easy, provided it is straightforward. He said we could grant him PoA if it got tricky, but I reckon it would be cheaper to have my mum or sister do it. Both have had PoA for other family members in the past so it's not unknown to them.

The worst thing was the shock of our mortgage revaluation. We'd let the house out 3 years ago when we left the UK and got a bargain of a mortgage at that time. That product is now coming to an end and they're forcing me onto another buy-to-let product that increases our mortgage payments by 400 quid a month!! : The rent would cover this, but wouldn't leave much left over in case things go wrong. And as DH says, we're not planning on going back to the UK, and if we did we probably wouldn't move back to Derby anyway! So why hang onto it? I guess I'm just thinking that any foot on the property ladder is a good foot! But having said that, if we've got the equity released, we're in a good position when it comes time to buy over here.

Will keep you posted.