Building regs etc

[noddyholder]

the house we are planning to buy has a room in the roof which the current owner says was there when he moved in(this is true)but now that we come to finalise things the surveyor has undervalued it because he saw no paperwork for the room and says he will only amend valuation with the relevant documents.Our seller doesn't seem to have any and he moved in in 1997.Who keeps this info?If I rang the council would they have records of planning/building regs for addresses going back at least 10 years?He says he thinks the roof room was done in 1990 and is sure his solicitor would never have let him buy it without the paperwork but I am not risking it.

phone your local planning department......if nothing else they will be able to tell you where you can find this information. also phone the local buildings inspector.......ours has been working the same area for years and knew our property when we phoned him. turns out there were issues on our property that had never been resolved and they didn't come up on the legal searches (but they weren't as drastic as a loft conversion) anyway i'm getting sidetracked. i know it was quite a long time ago but you never know if the buildings inspector has come across this property before.

But whether her thinks it was ok is irrelevant - you can't get the finances based upon the original valuation because of it and any subsequent buyers, should you pull out, will have the same problem. The onus is on him surely and if it means he has to contact his solicitor for the paperwork to do so, so be it. If he hasn't got it he (or his solicitor) could go to the planning offices himself or he could pay to upgrade it to current regulations. If you want to speed up the process you could do this yourself but going back that far may be a problem and involve cost. a call to them to find out the situation wouldn't hurt though. If you accept his word for it, it will come back to haunt you should you come to sell.

Hi thought this might be you again nodddy,

If they are not part of the documents held with land registry then I would contact the local planning office and see if they have any info re: dates and whether is was signed off for building regs. If they have no record of it then I think it seems a bit strange to me....

My solicitor says she has recieved all the bumpf today and will start going through it If there are no documents we will either pull out or try to get him to reduce the price and then try and get retrospective planning I think I will give the planning office a ring though just so that if I do have to look elsewhere I am prepared