Have you had your home valued for re-mortgage purposes lately?

[MoonFaceMama]

If so... What did you find?

Trying to work out if we can if the ltv we need. Have tried the online things but not many properties sold in our area lately, and we've done quite a bit to house so don't know how good a reflection the general market is. We're in the north. Have arranged for an estate agent to give a free valuation. Will the mortgage people value it about the same?

Our house would be valued by an Estate Agent at about £295K - £305 - I think a realistic selling price would be closer to £275 (possibly as low as £250 for a quick sale) seeing what similar houses have gone for. However the value which came back from the bank when we remortagaged was £185K.

Didn't matter to us, because we had enough equity for it not to be a problem (we needed 40% equity to get the best deal). Just be prepared for a bit of a shock. It doesn't actually mean that's all your house is worth.

Thanks jeee! That's a bit worrying though. We bought three years ago and scrimped and saved to put down a big deposit and hope to get a 75% ltv, but doesn't look good.

From experience, when you ask an existing lender to value your home, they won't move from their desk or screen. They will simply look at the type of house you have, for example, 3 bedroom semi, then look at what the average 3 bedroom semi has been selling for in your area and that is the value they will use. If you want a more accurate valuation from the current lender based on the value you have added, you will have to insist they come and visit the property.

Upmystreet.com will give you the average price for your property type in your area/post code.

Thanks cjlb. It's isn't our existing lender that we are looking at unfortunatly. Also few properties have sold in our area, lots of settled families, many of them selling from one generation to the next, having bought from the council and so very cheaply, dragging the average down iyswim.

The house we bought was on the market for 230. We bought it for 205. We just saw a copy of the mortgage survey and they said that 205 was right at the top of the price range for that type of property. Which surprised us as similar houses are on the market for 20 or 40k more round here. But IIRC when we bought our present house about 13yrs ago the report said something similar. Perhaps they tend to err on the side of caution?

We remortgaged with a new lender to fund an extension. Like Jee we were valued much less than we thought it was worth - although not that much.

I was honest about the problems we had ie dilapidated porch, problems with the drains, dreadful state of interiors but told him that this would all be resolved once we had finished the renovation work. He said he wasn't looking at that sort of stuff, he was looking at rebuild costs and the market generally.

But on the actual report the 'poor state of repair' was mentioned many many times.

It didn't really matter as we've been here 15 years so have plenty of equity in the house.

To add to my earlier comments - for our valuation they didn't even look at the house. I presume they simply typed in 'terrace', and the area. I think that we could have challenged the valuation and, for a fee, they'd have done a drive-by survey. We didn't care about the valuation, and were happy to avoid the survey fee. So you may well get be able to get a better valuation than we did.

Ironically Jeee ours would have been valued higher if they hadn't come to the house!

We'd have been okay on a drive-by - they couldn't see the windows that don't close, the pipes held together with duct tape.... If they'd been inside they'd probably tell us we'd need to pay someone to take the house off our hands.