CHECKLIST
Buying an Additional Property Checklist
About fifty five minutes, and the first fifteen have to happen before you make an offer rather than after it. Once you have offered, the price is fixed and the ownership structure is expensive to change, so almost everything worth deciding is decided before then.
- Five sections, eighteen checks, fifty five minutes
- The surcharge, the rental cover test and the ownership split
- The decisions that cost five figures to reverse later
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Who this checklist is for
Anyone buying a rental or a second property in England or Northern Ireland who wants the yield, the stamp duty, the finance and the ownership structure settled while they are still choices rather than consequences.
You are pricing the purchase off the asking price
The real entry cost is the price plus stamp duty at the surcharge rate plus legal fees plus any works before the first tenant, and the honest yield is measured against all of it. The checklist also prices in a void and a re-letting fee every year or two, because six weeks empty costs far more than six weeks of rent.
You have not decided whose name it goes in
Decide before you offer, because changing later means selling it to the new owner, with stamp duty and capital gains tax on the way. Personal or company turns mostly on the mortgage interest. Joint splits for married couples default to 50:50 whatever the deeds say, and moving off that takes the beneficial ownership plus a Form 17.
You are stretching to the largest loan on offer
The lender will test the rent at 125 to 145 per cent of the interest at a stressed rate, and you should run the same test two points above today before you fix. Interest is not a deduction any more, so you feel almost the whole of any rise, and the early repayment charge decides whether you can escape a bad fix.
FACTS
The surcharge applies to the band that used to be free
Five points on every band including the nil rate one, so a £250,000 flat costs £2,500 as a home and £15,000 as a rental. It rose from three points to five on 1 April 2025, which means any figure you remember from before then is low.
18 checks
Five sections
36 months
To sell the old main home and reclaim the surcharge
FACTS
What survives completion, and what does not
The EPC rating you inherit is a works bill waiting if it is poor. Licensing is set street by street, not city by city, so the last property being licence-free proves nothing about this one. And the gas and electrical certificates have to be in place before the first tenant, not after they have moved in.