We're buying a bungalow and had our offer of £300k accepted.
The bungalow and the surrounding properties were built in 1987, which makes it 35 years old and the people who own it have never skimped on anything, whether that be maintenance or appliances or any work on it. They've always paid for good stuff.
Which level of survey would you go for?
It depends on your level of competence and knowing what you are looking at. A bit of new decoration and a few carpets can hide multiple faults. Any cracks behind the wardrobes? :)
Note: a mortgage lender survey is possibly no more than a drive by, just to make sure that they will get the money back if you default.
Personally I tend to go for the middle one. YMMV
Unless there were cowboy builders involved or spray foam in the roof space I wouldn't expect there to be much wrong with a decent building of that age. The newest parts of my house are 10 years older than that!
My solicitor was suggesting, a very long time ago, that I should have a full survey done for a place I was buying. I responded that the report would be so full of caveats that there would be great difficulty in taking action in the event of trouble, and selecting a surveyor based on the adequacy of their insurance seemed to be rather missing the point. "Not necessarily" he replied "We have a number of such cases on our hands at the moment." At which juncture I felt that he had made my point for me.
Chris
I bought my last (80 year old) house for rather more than that without a proper survey because time was very short and because I had so little faith in surveyors and their reports. I poked-around in its nooks and crannies over a number of visits and thought I had spotted everything that was important, but we had already decided that we wanted the house so, with hindsight, I did not assess things objectively and did not spot the "bleedin' obvious" - this probably cost us over £80k. In your circumstances my advice, FWLIW, is to forget paying for a survey and to take a knowledgeable pal or two around the place with the brief of pointing-out everything that is bad in their eyes.
What was the 'obvious'?
I'd go for the full survey because the delta is only about £300 over the middle one which is nothing in the grand scheme of moving costs. If you'd spent £300 and saved £80k I think you'd be happy? (or spent £300 and decided it was worth an extra £80k to you)
I'd then aim to be on site with the surveyor (not necessarily following them around, but there to ask them questions): basically the surveyor is the 'knowledgeable pal' that you go and visit with, because not everyone has one of those - and your mate has exactly zero responsibility for your third-of-a-million quid purchase. Which is not to say you can't also drag your mate round if you insist.
If the surveyor spots something, you can ask them to point it out there and then, not when you read the report weeks later.
I don't expect the surveyor's report to say very much, but IMX things they tell you verbally give you much more information than guarded words in reports.
Theo
If you are taking out a mortgage, the Building Society will require a survey
+1
I would be inclined to find a surveyor and have a conversation with them about what you want to know. Chances are a basic valuation survey with a little bit of guidance from you as to what interests you in particular and what you don't care so much about should get a decent amount of information without paying for a "home buyers report". The home buyers reports tend to be very template driven, and so don't tend to cover any properties that are not "bog standard" that well.
When I bought the current place I told them just to look for major defects, and that I did no need to hear about plumbing or electrics since I could evaluate those myself.
It's a difficult one. Our house was surveyed when I bought it, the surveyor mentioned brick ties as it was apparently an issue with houses in that area and of that age at the time, i've never done anything about it, none of the neighbours have, that was nearly 30 years ago, walls all look straight.
I tried to borrow against it approx 8 years ago, there was talk of possible timber issues so the bank wouldn't lend without further investigation, I didn't bother and got a couple of small loans instead, i've since made holes and poked a camera under the floor, the timbers look like new to me despite being over 100 years old.
Bought a shop 5 years ago, much of the same... Pain in the ass and expense having extra inspections and reports.
IME surveyors don't do too much actual looking but make a list of things that *might* be a problem.
So if it was me i'd either have the cheapest one or the most expensive and thorough, having looked into how thorough it was and judged whether it was worth it.
Which is rather meaningless. It's more of a valuation to satisfy the mortgage lender that the property is worth the money being lent. The surveyor may not even leave his office but the report may say that the property needs a woodworm treatment guarantee etc.
When we bought our house, our surveyor let us down very, very badly. I didn't sue him, although I came close. In retrospect, I should have, as he was grossly negligent.
The basic valuation survey always seemed to me like count the number of rooms and multiply by the number of bathrooms or something equally daft!
Main things you want to know about in an old house is any signs of subsidence or structural problems with walls, rot, woodworm or rising damp. Stuff that can be very expensive or messy to put right, requires moving out for a while and/or requires specialist skills.
A particularly nasty one near me is a whole estate of houses that at the time we were buying all required to be underpinned because their foundations had been made with some weird cut price 70's concrete mix that gave up the ghost after about 25 years. Nice houses apart from the major structural problems with the foundations. We didn't buy one...
Also if we had bought our first house with all the carpets included we would never have known about all the faults with floorboards upstairs.
The Energy Performance Certificate is even worse tick box.
My parents house got marked down for "not being fully double glazed". The north facing larder window in the kitchen was a single pane of original frosted glass. Everything else was double glazed...
I don't think the clueless muppet had seen a larder before!
And beware of any strong smells like perfume sprayed around to mask something like a seriously defective class 2 flue (which caught me out with a 1976-built semi), plus the usual chestnuts like the smell of freshly brewed coffee or baked bread. If it had a baxi gas back boiler from new (likely) then I expect that will have been replaced but what age is the current boiler ?.
Essential to get up in the loft and see how the roof is constructed, and what sort of insulation there is. Are the gable ends plumb ?. Do any purlins in a cut-roof have diagonal bracing down to an internal wall ?. If so this wall cannot be removed without replacing with a steel beam.
A 1987 property will only have had 4 inches of fibrglass in between the trusses/ceiling joists (if that) from new and no cavity wall insulation.
A full survey might pressure test the drains but if you can lift any inspection chamber covers you will see if everything is running clear. Watch out trees within 10 metres of the drains, or further if it is certain species.
What it won't detect is what I discovered with my current property while trying to get a cable through the cavity wall 1 brick course above the dpc. The brickies had thrown all the snots down inside the cavity and even inside the class 2 flue blocks. The cavity was full of mortar dropping and scrapings for the first three courses above the dpc. (Still didn't cause any obvious damp though)
Check the boundary fences. Being a modern property the fence/wall that is to your right as you look out of the back door is generally yours. The one at the bottom of the garden needs confirmation by looking at the T-marks on the land registry.
Boundary fences/walls/structures do NOT cross the boundary. Your right hand, rear fence (as viewed from your back door) should be entirely on your land. If this is a semi or terraced building then it is easy to confirm this by looking at the distance between windows of adjacent properties. With detached properties it is not so easy to prove/disprove that any fencing work done since 1987 was done by someone who knows that boundary fences do not cross boundaries.
Forget electrics unless it still has Wylex re-wireable fuses. You should allow for a CU change if this is the case but the existing wiring will be modern PVC and the power sockets in a 1987 property should be fed from 2.5mmx2 plus a 1.5mm earth so don't be bullied into the 'full rewire needed' scam. Before 1984 the earth wire would only be 1mm which have a habit of breaking if cack-handed prvious owners have been fitting blingy, modern sockets.
There is no-one more deceitful than a seller who knows that there are problems with the property and will go out of his way to hide these facts from the buyer.
The 'homebuyers report' is very red/yellow/green colour coded, for people who don't know very much. OTOH it's the cheapest kind of survey beyond the strictly mortgage valuation (which might not involve a site visit and might not use a qualified surveyor), so I wouldn't expect to be able to get a surveyor out of bed for much less.
I agree about not bothering with things they're just going to say 'I'm not qualified, needs a specialist' but TBH I doubt they spend much time on those things anyway. However I think there's value having someone cover the things you didn't think to ask about, and the 'tell me if the roof is ok' approach might miss a problem you never thought to ask about the drains.
Theo
It totally depends on your knowledge, and whether you may be able to use bad results to negotiate down. Pro surveys are mostly useless discaimers, negative value recommendations, vague or wrong evaluations, and can scupper mortgages or incur costs. Now & then they pick up something the diyer buyer missed - it's a gamble whether you can use it to negotiate down or you get coerced into another scam by it.
You can probably guess I'm no fan of pro surveys. OTOH some people have no understanding of what they're buying. 87 pretty much gets you out of the trickier areas of historic properties & faulty construction systems.
I had a look at a house a friend was wanting to buy, and it was a definite run run away one. She didn't know. Historic buildings are riddled with gotchas.
I'm suspecting that searches and surveys are not what they used to be. Having lived around here well before some of the houses behind me and down the hill existed. I know that many of them were built on top of a filled in clay quarry. What they did is pushed a load of clinkers from a huge pile imported from who knows where, into the hole, we used to call it the bricky and fish for sticklebacks in it as it was full of water. They then got a load of soil from somewhere, Shoved that on top, and then concreted a big flat sheet over that, but left space for gardens etc. Spool forward to more recent times and a couple of the houses lost porches into a bloody great hole and part of the road fell in. Along comes the council and back fills it all and all seems well for a few years, but now once again, there is a decided dent in the rod again. When I told one of the residents, just in passing that you have to expect this kind of thing when you are built on a clay quarry site, it seems they had no idea this was the case. The house has changed hands several times since then, and not wishing to get embroiled, I never say anything, but it does make you wonder if those residents and indeed many around here, realise that there were many clay quarries filled in and built on since the 1950s to now. There were also a load of buildings mostly made of asbestos which were bulldozed into the hole as well, and yet now one sees planning applications containing clauses for contaminated land mitigation measures. Obviously things have tightened up somewhat now, but existing builds are on unknown ground. This same estate was built at the bottom of the hill on designated riverbed, the river having been culbated, and the inspectors made them dig up all the footings which were too shallow and put in deeper ones, So when they landscaped the remaining land they crunched up the old concrete and buried it just below the surface. Its now beginning to show through of course. One block was built too close to the pylons and in the end it was allowed to remain, but if you stand at the end of that block with a bit of metal, you can feel the buzz as you move your finger over it.
Brian
When we sold our house, the purchaser's surveyor let us down. He left an outside tap running which we didn't notice for several weeks. £200 down the drain, literally.
To be fair to Thames Water (not something you'll read very often), they have a once-only leak compensation scheme and we were able to claim it back.
There were several things, but the tarmac drive being close to end-of-life was quite a biggie that's currently nagging at me - I'm anticipating that it will cost 30-40k next year.
As I said earlier, if I was doing this again I'd get a knowledgeable pal or two to do an un-blinkered critique but I think the suggestion of getting a surveyor to do a non-attributable walk and talk would be useful. The written reports have too many caveats to be much use, but a surveyor should be unbiased and knowledgeable so could be the needed "critical friend".
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