Fensa Certificate Advice

[mumjimmer]

Hi all,
We are in the process of selling our house and it has only just dawned on us that there are no FENSA certs for the windows/doors. We had known this because it was brought up by our solicitor when we were nearing completion on buying the house. The seller had to provide insurance to cover this issue for two years on the property. We are now 8 years on and in the same position and not able to provide certs to our buyer.

If I were to pay £10 to search on the Fensa website for a replacement cert and there were none, do the authorities automatically get flagged? ie. council? etc. www.fensa.co.uk/asp/certificate.asp

As I understand it from reading other blogs, we should not approach the council on the matter as they could insist that they are all replaced!

I am not sure how long the Fensa link has been available for the public to use. There is an outside chance the windows/doors were fitted above board but no-one had given our previous owner the paperwork. I would assume that our solicitor had made inquiries at the time of our purchase, but I could not say for sure. There is therefore a chance that spending £10 and getting the appropriate paperwork from Fensa could resolve this problem, but then again...

There are no kite standard marks on the windows which leads me to believe that they may have been installed by an unauthorized company.

i do not want to make a search and open a can of worms.!

Advice anyone?

Your solicitor will advise you on what to do but I think you can just get insured as your vendor did when you bought.

Wouldn't worry. We didn't have the cents on ours and our buyers didn't make an issue of it. If your buyers do the. You can get indemnity insurance for around £40 I think.

can't you just sell on the indemnity policy ? Maybe the windows predate the system (introduced around 2000 iirc) You can search the FENSA website for free but it won't change anything not being registered. Council aren't involved unless you speak to them

Indemnity insurance will sort it out

thanks all for your quick responses...
On the 'indemnity insurance',... I think our previous owner had to cover our property with this policy for two years, is this standard? ... or can you be held responsible indefinitely? I know it sounds a bit mad.

afaik they aren't usually time specific .

it sinlt you being held responsible , it the insurance company covering it ie . redoing the window, or council enforcing building regs retrospectively

Same happened to us - no cert when we purchased so sellers took out an indemnity policy. When we sold four years later we had to update the policy from the previous selling price of the house to the new selling price (if that makes sense!). Solicitors sorted it out, cost around £30.