Altaf Hussain

I will forever be grateful to Altaf Hussain. I doubt we will ever meet him again, and we haven’t stayed in touch but we credit some of our success in life to him.

About 18 months after we got married, maybe a little more, we wanted to buy a house. We lived in Stoke on Trent where lots of property was cheap (our friends bought a house for £21k) and we wanted in. We didn’t have a deposit, as we only had only been earning enough to cover the basics, and neither of our sets of parents had money to help us out. We weren’t actually sure we’d get on the property ladder.We’d been living in one of the rougher (although definitely not the roughest) parts of town and had rented two houses, one after the other, from the same landlord. We saw some action in that area. When we first moved in (as soon as we were married) there were whispers about recent murder in the park. We soon discovered we lived in the red light district and from the windows of our first house one night we watched a house get trashed and a TV get thrown out of an upstairs window.

We knew we didn’t want to hang around much longer; especially if we were going to have children, which was our intention.

So we found a house we liked, in a nicer area and went to talk to the mortgage people. We were naïve, not having had any training or experience in this kind of transaction.

The owner of the house, Altaf, cut a deal with us which was called a vendor paid deposit. So basically he dropped the price by 3% and that was our deposit. It’s not often you get a 100% or 97% mortgage these days! You can see the roof of our house, just behind the canal in this picture…

Not only did he do that for us- which he told us he had done because he could see we were a young couple starting out, and he and his wife had been in a similar position a few years beforehand- but he let us move in before the mortgage went through and rent for a few months so we could get started.

We’ve come a long way from our £33k home in Stoke on Trent. We made enough on the sale to be able to move to Sussex and will (hopefully) shortly be looking at deposits and mortgages for our next home. Thanks Altaf!