Private road - what do I need to be wary of

[Loueytb3]

About to put an offer in on a house which is on a private road. The road has only 7 houses in it and it is a no-through road. My understanding is that private road = unadopted road and therefore we could be liable if a gas main/other utility needs repair and for road repairs.

I have already asked the estate agents to find out how much the management fee is, whether there is a sink fund for repairs (and how much there is in it) and whether we are liable for all utilities.

Is there anything else I should be asking? I realise that some of the information may not be available until the solicitor gets involved.

Can you see what sort of vehicles use it? I live on a private road and it's just cars using it and it hasn't really needed much doing to it since it was built (about 15 years ago). My friend lives on a private road that has farm access and access to a field with horses, and the road surface is a total state with potholes and loose bits of tarmac.

We pay about €1000 a year per household (9 houses), but I think most of that goes on maintenance of the electric gate and gardeners for the common area.

Cars only. It is gated. The houses were built in 2002/3 so it's not that old. It looks well maintained.

Gates are expensive, and annoying. Ours breaks down fairly frequently which can be a pain in the neck, although usually it's only one side or the other that doesn't work so we can still get the cars in and out. On the other hand, I hadn't realised just how many cold callers work our area until the first time the gate had to be left open for a whole day.

What about internet provision, many cable suppliers won't put cables in.

Yes, that's an issue for us. We can only have the supplier who put cables in when the road was built, which wasn't too bad until Virgin bought NCT and now our cable has gone way downhill.

My PIL live in one. Road full of very deep pot holes, barely driveable yet hardly anyone wants to chip in to get in tarmaced as lots of new people moved in over past few years who PIL don't know - ie not original good neighbours.

Oh - I hadn't thought about cable/sky/broadband. That could be an issue with DH...

I know there are likely to be issues with the gates. At the moment, the intercom is not working on the house we want to buy and they are trying to get it fixed so I suspect that will be an annoying problem.

When we moved here the intercom and gate release was pretty dodgy and it was eventually replaced with a mobile phone based system, which works reasonably well.

Make sure you have proper rights of access pedestrian and vehicular over the road
Find out who owns road
Check how repairs are organised