Re-negotiating purchase price after survey - dodgy roof!?

[runningLou]

Re-locating to Manchester from Midlands. Found a lovely house, hoping to move in 2 months' time (I know, I know ...). Survey done on Friday - I had misgivings as Friday 13th cannot be best day for a survey! Anyway, surveyor called DH to check she was meant to be doing Homebuyer's Report and as she couldn't get hold of him before going in, she spoke to him afterwards, and said that the house roof (slate, 1930s) would need replacing within 5 years. Some slates have slipped, and there is no underfelt. In short term we could get slipped slates re-attached, but the house will need re-roofing fairly soon.
This sounds like a BIG and expensive job to me. How to we go about re-negotiating the price? Am a bit loath to annoy seller too much as the house went to sealed bids after 3 days on the market so they now if this falls through other buyers will be queuing up ... but then surely a dodgy roof would be an issue for everyone?
Can we ask for the purchase price to be adjusted to take this into account? How much should it go down by?

We were told that our roof needed replacing when we bought our house thirty years ago. It's still going strong, with the odd tile being renewed.

That five years could probably stretch to many more. A roof does not need to be perfect to be perfectly serviceable.

Have all similar houses nearby been reroofed?

We also had the roof advice in our house, we let is pass as it was an older house and it looked about the same as all the other roofs in the area, but we'd already paid less than asking. We patched up and its still going strong. Currently under offer and same thing came up, our buyers have let this pass too.

I think if you are buying an older house then you can't automatically expect discounts for what may be needed several years in the future. Its part of ongoing maintenance. When we sold our previous house we discounted to allow buyers to fix a problem raised in the survey which was having an immediate impact, unbeknownst to us.

You can ofcourse ask as they may be really keen to keep things moving rather than start again with another buyer but don't be surprised if they say no, especially if they had several interested parties.

Thanks that's really useful. It's difficult for me to check out roofs up and down same street as we're so far away, so have sent my Dad (whose dad was a roofer!) to have a scout around and let me know what he thinks. I guess it will depend on the exact wording of the report and how imminent it sounds ...
I'm guessing 'patching up' a roof isn't too expensive?

I have never bought a house where the survey doesn't say that the roof will need replacing within X years. I've only replaced one roof in 20 years of house ownership. I have slipped tiles on my 1920s roof - it's probably going to cost me around £200-300 to get those ones replaced because you can access my roof without scaffolding. Scaffolding is v expensive

This happened to us, with a 1960s house. Different issue, but still roof.

We got two quotes from local roofers and on advice from our mortgage broker asked for a discount to the tune of the lowest quote. About £1.5k IIRC

The seller replied that he'd knock £250 off the asking price and rip out all the carpets before he left.

Quite the charmer, that fella.

old roofs never had underfelt on them - this is quite a modern thing.

every two years we get our roof checked over for broken and slipped slates, check lead around chimneys etc. and have ever only had a small bill but no real issues - our roof is 150yrs old now and is still going strong.

what you don't want is nail sickness - where all the slate nails are rusty and slates are coming off because of that - if you do have that then the slates do normally have to come off and renailed - it can be expensive.

Our roof was the original one, 1910, no underfelt. Tiles are easily replaced, and if you get the roof checked every once in a while, then a 100 year old roof can last really well. We had no felt on our roof (it wasn't fitted as standard in 1910). It is now being re-done but ONLY because we are having a loft conversion.

In my uninformed view, a lack of felt is not a reason to re-do a roof. I would question the surveyor further to find out if there is any reason why she thinks it needs to be replaced (other than the felt). If not, my opinion would be don't worry.

Same view as other posters - 1930 built house, no felt and roof tiles not slates. Our homebuyers survey stated we would need to replace the roof in X years. There's nothing wrong with it in that it is watertight and the loft is insulated so no problems.

We have a few things like this on our survey report, but we think a) the surveyor is recommending best practice, with our interests in mind, and it's up to us to decide what to do about it and b) in practice it may not need to happen very soon, it's part of maintaining an older house, we're getting a bargain which gives us some room to spend on it later, and we want to keep things jolly and civil. If the house was at the top of our budget and they hadn't already dropped the price we would probably ask if we could have a contribution towards (half?) i.e. lower the price by that amount.

Also, if you decide against negotiating a reduction, why not tell them that your survey said x, but you're not going to ask them to reduce the price...you never know if that favour might come back to benefit you later in the sale. We're asking our solicitor to pass it on as we know that the vendor had trouble with the person they bought the house off quibbling over petty things and we want to reassure them that we're not like that and hopefully it will encourage them to be nice to us too!