To think surveyors are the most useless bunch of twunts ever fairly closely followed by my dh?

[lecce]

I already have a thread with all the details on property, but, basically, we have -for the second time- been the victim of a ridiculously over-cautious survey on our house. At the very least it has cost us £10 000 but it could be more, or the whole sale could still fall through because of it.

We have lived here 8 years. The house has lived here 107 years. It is not about to fall down. We have looked after it pretty well, it is not a money pit, it is/was well-priced for the area, we have two small children and they live here happily and healthily - not in damp conditions and, no, no wasps buzzing around from the nest in the loft .

The woman who is/was buying it loved it. It was perfect for her. Now she may not have it . Oh, but she is a bitch too - despite the fact that we have already agreed to a £10 000 discount she has still left us hanging all weekend instead of coming back and telling us whether that is good enough or not .

And every time I start, admittedly ranting, about fucking surveyors/buyers etc, dh snaps, "Oh can't you just be positive/constructive?" No I fucking can't, I am anagry and sad and it is their fault .

You took a sensible approach unfortunately not everybody does that.

You are right in what you are saying. It is a 100 year old property and won't be perfect but some purchasers do expect it to be perfect.

My estate agent said something the other day that made perfect sense (unusual for an estate agent!!), if you can't accept the rough edges then you shouldn't be buying a 2nd hand property. Very wise words but it still doesn't stop people buying 2nd hand properties and expecting them to be like new builds!

Personally I wouldn't have dropped £10,000 on the say so of a purchaser. I would have established what the surveyor had raised as concerns (irrespective of how petty you think they are) and got the relevant experts in to get reports. Might have cost a couple of hundred pounds but could have saved you £10,000.

In this day and age of law-suits the surveyors err on the side of caution. Yeah, the CCTV report isn't necessary but I bet there has been an instance where it wasn't recommended to be carried out and there turned out to be an expensive problem that was laid firmly at the surveyors door!

Thank you both . Kazza think we may have been a bit hasty... I am never doing this again - if we ever do move that will be it until I am carried out in a box .

LOL.

They do say moving house is the most stressful thing you can do.

If it helps, we were due to exchange on the Thursday with completion set for the Friday. My removal firm couldn't move me on the Friday so I arranged for them to move me on the Thursday (stuff was going in to storage and we were moving in with family until I could find somewhere to live so didn't need to vacate on the day of completion).

Waved my removal firm off and then got a call from my Solicitor to tell me my purchasers had pulled out!!!! Stressed Much!!!

Thankfully found new buyers the following day but it's going really slowly (has been 2 months so far)!

Ohhh, I always get a CCTV report on the drains, very well spent money if you ask me. Gives me peace of mind and always useful to have if. There are problems in the future.

Gosh, Kazza I think I would be a complete basket-case if I was in your position now, or dh would have strangled me . Hope you get it sorted really soon. Surely there must be a better way to do this??

The Scottish way is much better. The sooner we adopt it the better. We made a half hearted attempt with the HIPS reports etc but that was never going to work!

PS. I find wine and chocolate helps with the stress!

Erm, when we bought our 1903 terrace they never said about damp. I think the usual caveats are that they don't test the electrics and heating systems, anything else I'd want properly investigated.

You can't blame the buyer for wanting to pay what the mortgage company valuation suggests, she has basically been given a piece of paper saying that if you pay over x then you are throwing your money away. If you lose this buyer probably the next valuation would say the same.

But, you are allowed to be cheesed off. It all sounds very annoying.

lecce , Sorry about the 10.000.
It is annoying that the vendor is expected to finance the buyer. Because that is what it means!!
Next thing w'll know is : Yes the house is great, but it needs decorating and the garden is overgrown, so therefore your asking price is too much.

edwin where is your damp?

I wonder whether some surveyors have only trained in modern building standards and don't really understand older houses?

Im with you op! Our house is 1901, has no formal dpc and came back on survey when we bought it. I just ignored it- and guess what 5 years on we have no damp!

I don't know how many times people I've come across have spent £1000 on totally useless damp proofing that doesn't work because at no time has a surveyor identified the actual cause of damp- just recommends a particular product they are plugging. damp metres are useless in an historic property as well, total nonsense you can stick an electronic probe into a wall and diagnose.

What frustrates me is people like the idea of a period property but then want totally modern specifications. I've seen so many houses trashed because of completely unnecessary works.

I should add not all surveyors are bad- specialists who deal with historic fabric are great- i know a few who are fab. it's ones who tend just to do the basics or you can't choose as its down to the mortgage company.

My fave quote in an article by the RICS that I read once was disputing rising damp as a myth in most cases citing that its "as common as rocking-horse shit" excellent!

Rant over!!!

I've skimmed your thread, but yes agree wholeheartedly that surveyors are a total waste of time. I'vce sold two properties with glaring problems and bought others (current house had a hole in the roof) with equal problems that the utterly dim surveyors failed to spot. It's not fucking hard frankly.

I can't possibly comment on your DH but my guess is you are right there too.

Sorry to hear of your frustration OP but surveyors are advised forced to be cautious.

I know several who feel immense frustration that their own professional body and their PI insurers surround them with so many restrictions they can do little about.

One was talking to me on Thursday about the fact that he would love to be more open and offer a genuine opinion but the small print of his PI policy and the standardised wording of his employer's (a bank) report forced him into recommending additional reports which he genuinely believed were not necessary. He is easily able to provide advice on damp or structural problems but was barred from doing so.

And his biggest gripe (it was a long and bitter rant to me) was the mortgage survey fee - equated to less than £10 per hour for two degrees, five years training and 25 years experience)!

I'm glad I'm not a surveyor (I'm an architect)!

Blame the fee-chasing lawyers for cautions, caveat-ridden surveys.

I agree with you OP. Our house is 1911 and we had a full structural survey which told us nothing but get more reports so, with the assistance of a surveyor friend, I complained and they redid the survey but it still told us bugger all!

Our valuation was about £10k below the agreed price but we proceeded anyway, I think that was not unusual in a buoyant market but buyers may feel differently in a shaky one.

YABU surveyors are not twunts !

All houses have damp by the way and yours defiantley will being 100 years old.

Surveyors are their to find any problems with a house and they do need to list everything. The person buying it doesn't want to move in and find problems that they didn't know about, it could be very costly and they need to know the cost of work to reflect it in the price they are paying. Why should they overpay? Then spend more money when they move in.
If the surveyor doesn't list everything then they will be sued by your buyer, so why wouldn't they list everything?

I'd sound proof the cellar so that when you take the surveyor down there to torture, no-one would hear. HTH.

As far as I can make out, lenders' valuers always value a house at a bit less than the price agreed.

Has anybody here ever seen a case where they didn't?

YAmost certainly NBU about the comment re period features! What an utterly nobbish comment!

As for the rest, well... they have a job to do and they probably are proscribed by the banks and mortgage companies they work for these days, on the grounds that they have been badly burnt by their feckless lending before now and are trying to claw back as much as they can from the property market now by lending as little as they can get away with.

BUT - bloody frustrating nonetheless. I bought a 1910 house back in the 90s, and had a mid-range survey done on it - the surveyor insisted that a gallows bracket had to be placed under the RSJ holding up the chimney breast in the loft conversion, even though it bore no load at all, looked bloody ugly and was a menace to people's heads as they went up the stairs. Pointless! But had to be done to fulfil the mortgage company's requirements (or I wouldn't have got the mortgage).

Good luck with selling it.

Non-clean lines, btw, means that the walls aren't strictly square or straight any more, which isn't at all surprising in a house of that age. Mine had some interesting "non-true" lines; made putting architraving up more, um, interesting. Still manageable though!

Piglet John, I've seen more cases where the lenders valuer has valued the house at the agreed price than not.

In fact, 100% of the deals I have dealt with this year have been valued at the asking price.

In addition, I am selling my own property and there have been 2 valuations carried out on it and both valuations came out at the agreed price (my property is 80+ years old).

Pigletjon- ours was, when we challenged the original valuation that had knocked 30% off. We thought the fact the (in this case definitely a twat) surveyor hadn't managed to accurately count the number of rooms he'd been into was reasonable grounds and his employer agreed.

The survey when my MIL was selling her early victorian cottage came back saying the stairs creaked (really, who would have thought) and the buyers tried to knock money off. Actually a tip for any buyers- if you're trying to rip off an old lady, don't go and boast about it in the pub 3 doors down, it WILL get back to them.

In Scotland, it's standard to offer less than the vendor's valuation report- at least 10%. No bank will lend based on a vendor's home report - and will insist on having it's own valuation done for lending purposes. So a sellers' home report here isn't worth the paper it's written on.

And for the record, my property is over 100 years old, there is no damp. I've bought, done up & sold many places in my time so I have a reasonable understanding of the buying & selling process.

YABU to make so many bitter and sweeping generalisations about surveyors. A surveyor is an "actual professional person".

Just because previous surveyors haven't found problems, doesn't mean they weren't there. It's probably the more thorough reports that are more accurate I'm afraid.

If you were buying a house, wouldn't you want to know if there were any potential problems? It works both ways.

A buyer's offer is always going to be conditional on a good survey. That's why it's not finalised until after the survey has done.

It's quite normal for a buyer to take into account the results of a survey and the work needed on the house - you'll have to suck it up I'm afraid.

Am a bit that you think she should pay more because "she has a sizeable deposit".

Actually, I retract my earlier post, I just remembered how great the surveyor of the buyers who bought our first house off us was. He completely missed the fact that the side elevation was bowing out and not tied into the first floor. Thank goodness for his incompetence. (We sold it 20 years ago, very cheaply as a total do-it-upper and at no point did we lie or 'omit' this information.)

Of course, when we bought the house our surveyor also missed this important defect despite the fact there was plenty of evidence- cracks, roof spread and bowing walls .

It may be quite normal for a buyer to use the results of a survey to try to negotiate a price down, but equally normal for a seller to say "yes, it's an old house and I took its condition into account when setting the asking price (and if you can find a better house for the money, go and buy it)

That last bit may be spoken or implied.

In our case we had mid range survey which has raised issues but valuation is same as agreed sale price. However, we are having people go round and give us quotes so we know what we are in for. So far vendor has agreed to replace a gas pipe (gas guy has been in), we didn't ask for this, but they have offered. The house we are buying is as old (100+) as the one we are buying so I kind of knew what to look for! I do think surveyors are overly cautious but that's the nature of the job I guess. We had a proper damp survey done on ours because of the survey and the buyers being put off...