Q My wife and I jointly own a listed manor house with a number of outbuildings including a converted barn which is used as a holiday let. We own the house and all outbuildings plus about 10 acres of land. We were intending to add a second en-suite bathroom in the holiday let and hoping to take out a mortgage for around £50,000 to pay for the development. We wanted to raise a mortgage against our home which is valued at £1.25m. We have lived in it for three years and are mortgage free. My wife is 53 and works full time and has an annual income of £40,000. I am 61 and retired, so look after the holiday let and all our gardens. Please can you advise as to what type of mortgage options would be available? We expected to be able to get a normal residential mortgage. The payment is not dependent on the holiday let income. As soon as we mention a holiday let all standard mortgage providers shy away. I cannot understand why. We have a 100% equity in our property and only require a small mortgage over, say, 15 years. A The reason that standard mortgage providers shy away from your pretty niche proposition is quite straightforward. According to independent mortgage advisor Luther Yeates of Clifton Private Finance, “banks and building societies aren’t really set up to look at your fairly complex set-up and then work out if they can offer a solution. They’re looking at the criteria for the loans they’ve got on offer, and ticking off if you match”. Yeates explains that high-street lenders can also find it challenging to consider other less standard areas such as ex-pat mortgages, funding for property renovation and home-owner builders, as well as people looking to borrow more than the usual 3.5 times their income. But if you do have non-standard mortgage requirements, says Yeates, “it can be worthwhile to make use of the services of a mortgage broker” not least because “lenders will offer lower rates to brokers, than walk-up clients, for doing the hard work for them”. In your case, “the reason you’re running into problems is probably because there’s a substantial amount of land, and the holiday let, your home and the land are all on one title. The solution would be to split the title and raise the loan of £50,000 secured against just your home. Then the barn, owned on a separate title, is mortgage free and you don’t have to worry about any lenders’ concerns about holiday letting”. And the good news is that if you did do what’s been suggested, there is a bank prepared to lend over 15 years at either a two-year fix of 1.29% or 2.44% over 10 years provided you use a broker to put the proposal to them. Alternatively, if you didn’t want to do the title split, there is a building society which could set up a bespoke mortgage deal for you, but the interest rates would be higher than with the title-split option. Want expert help finding your new mortgage? Use our new online tool to search 1000s of deals from over 80 lenders with the Guardian Mortgage Service, powered by L&C.