Moving to Scotland: Why and How
For over a decade my wife and I (and most recently our daughter) have been holidaying across the many regions of Scotland.
This year, after a few years of pondering and discussing, we’ve made the decision to change our lives and take the first major step towards realizing a dream by selling our house in the East of England, intentionally becoming homeless, and travelling to find our forever dream somewhere in the North East of Scotland.
This is the first post in what I hope will be a series on my family’s move to Scotland. Follow our journey by keeping an eye on the Move to Scotland post category .
Why?
Why you ask? Well, why not?
We’ve always enjoyed the natural environment and the great outdoors, and Scotland has that in spades. From lochs to mountains; beaches to nature reserves; islands to historic monuments, its awe-striking beauty and untouchedness in its rural locations have to be experienced to be truly appreciated.
It might sound sentimental (and somewhat cringe), but my wife and I have always felt an immediate sense of peace the moment we hit the winding mountainous roads on the drive in.
The people we’ve met along the way have consistently been friendly, happy people and the pride Scots take in their country and where they live is admirable. They’ve welcomed us on our travels with open arms, and the community spirit we’ve seen has made us feel truly at home.
Though we currently live in a semi-rural village close to a larger town, it’s becoming less rural by the year. London is expanding outwards; everywhere is becoming busier; local services such as schools, dentists and doctors are oversubscribed and it’s becoming less of a place we’d choose to start our lives if we were lucky enough (as we are now) to make such a monumental change.
We could move more rurally in England, but Scotland is the place we want to be.
Why the North East?
From our travels, it has the best balance between rurality and the ability to get to a city if required. Most of the North East is within a two hour drive of Aberdeen.
While I work remotely, I am required on occassion (quarterly) to venture into the head office in London. The availability of an airport makes it possible for me to travel, work and be home over the course of a couple of days. Similarly, it makes it easier for our family from the East of England and Europe to get to us without a fourteen hour drive.
Secondly, despite my wife and I originally dreaming of going even more rural and deeper into the highlands, we value the availability of education and healthcare being within a reasonable distance. My Nan lived in a rural village in Ayrshire and had a single doctor visit weekly, a dentist bi-weekly and relied heavily on air ambulances due to the nearest ambulance station being located so far away. As any parent knows: kids are clumsy, love getting sick and having that fear constantly on our minds would numb the experience for us.
Finally, living rurally was our choice. It wasn’t our daughter’s. Putting her in a position where she’d be unable to make or see friends due to travel time would not be fair. Being in a slightly less rural place that still allows those opportunities as she gets older alongside the advantages and lifestyle still-rural living offers is something we feel obliged to do as parents.
What?
Our dream home checklist:
- House or bungalow (minimum of 4 bedrooms and 2 reception rooms)
- 1,750sqft or larger
- No immediate neighbours
- 1+ acres of land preferable, or a large garden with additional land available to purchase nearby
- In liveable but “modernisation-friendly” condition
We’re looking to strike a balance between needing modernisation and remaining liveable. We’ve renovated our current house inside and out; rebuilt a boat; built numerous stables and sheds and thus consider ourselves quite handy, so we’re happy to completely change the house over time. What we don’t want though is to be in a situation where everything is unsafe, unsuitable or disgusting and needs immediately resolving!
How?
Finding Houses
A not so obvious difference between property hunting in England and in Scotland is that Rightmove and/or Zoopla is significantly less popular in the Saltire-flagged country than they are in the St George’s Cross-flagged.
The reason for this is that estate agents in Scotland are commonly ran by conveyancing solicitors, and nearly all conveyancing solicitors are members of their area’s solicitor owned SPC (Solicitors Property Centre). These co-operative networks have their own marketing and property platforms which cost significantly less than the others and remove their dependency on monopolistic services.
- Edinburgh Solicitors’ Property Centre (ESPC) – https://espc.com/
- Aberdeen Solicitors’ Property Centre (ASPC) – https://www.aspc.co.uk/
- Tayside Solicitors Property Centre (TSPC) – https://tspc.co.uk/
- Fife & Kinross Solicitors Property Centre (FKSPC) – https://www.fifespc.co.uk/
- Borders Solicitors Property Centre (BSPC) – https://www.bspc.co.uk/
- Highland Solicitors Property Centre (HSPC) – https://www.hspc.co.uk/
- Perth Solicitors Property Centre (PSPC) – https://www.pspc.co.uk/
Offers Over
Something that scares English buyers is the often touted “Offers Over” system. Whilst it’s true that properties can and do go for a premium over the advertised price (sometimes over and above the home report value which has to be funded entirely by the buyer), this tends to be for more in demand properties than those that are more rural or have become stale. Estate agents, mortgage brokers and solicitors have all advised us that the longer the property has been on the market, the more open the seller is likely to be for negotiation under that advertised value.
Conveyancing Differences
The main problem you run into when looking to move from England to Scotland is that they have two separate and different conveyancing legal systems.
When buying a house in England, you aren’t legally required to follow through with the purchase of a house until the very last moment when contracts are exchanged. This usually happens between a week and a month before you move in. Up until that contract exchange either party is free to walk away, try and renegotiate, or accept a better offer from an alternative buyer (a process known as gazumping). The entire process takes a minimum of 6 weeks but an average of 12-16.
In Scotland, you’re legally bound much earlier in the process. You submit your offer, have it agreed, then sign the missives. All other work is done after this step has completed. There is no way out of purchasing the property other than foregoing your deposit (and the seller’s legal fees) or something untoward being raised during the conveyancing process. Gazumping and mind changing happens rarely, and as such the process is much faster and the average completion time is 6 weeks.
What this means in practice is that performing a lateral house move from England to Scotland is almost impossible. If you do manage to achieve the impossible and get an offer accepted subject to your English house sale completing (unlikely), you’ll need to find an English solicitor and a Scottish solicitor that are willing to work together and pay them appropriately.
The easiest solution to this problem is to sell your house in England chain-free, become technically homeless, then perform an unconnected (and much easier) purchase in Scotland after.
Our Plan
My family and I are not lucky enough to have close friends or relatives with enough room to house us in Scotland or nearby whilst we look for our new home. In addition, because I’ll still be working throughout the entire process, my wife and I want to be as close to the houses we’re viewing to minimise travel time or long weekends we’d have to take away from our daughter.
We’ve therefore made the decision to stay in short-term lets until we kick the purchasing process off. We’ll send most of our belongings off to storage; set our correspondence address to one of our parents’; chuck the things we’ll need (coffee machine) in a trailer we’ve purchased; and move from holiday let to holiday let with ourselves and our dogs for as long as it takes.
It’s going to be hard work and undoubtedly stressful, but is the best financial choice and gives us the most freedom to relocate to places that make sense to us.
We’ve already made strides towards simplifying the process and reducing that stress by completing introductions with Scottish solicitors and going through most of the onboarding process with an excellent Glasgow-based mortgage broker we found.
For work I’ll be purchasing Starlink, portable monitors and working at whatever flat surface I can find in the place we’re staying, a nearby co-working space or a cafe serving decent coffee.