The house we want to buy has no building reg.'s

[lorach]

We put an offer (my first house purchase) on an old terrace house (built 1890) last September. It's an interesting quirky conversion, an 'upside down house' with 2 bedrooms and bathroom on the ground floor and living room and dining room on the top floor. It would have been a major project with the walls and ceilings being removed on the first floor, making a wonderful large open plan room (with 2 large supporting beams) straight up to the roof. For the asking price it is great and all we can afford.
However the vendor has no paper work at all!.... no electricity/oil heating safety certs, windows, building reg's, nothing.
When I conveyed my concerns to the EA she seemed surprised that the seller had no paper work (!?) and said that the vendor may have an Indemnity Insurance so not to worry. I had never heard of Indemnity Ins, but felt reassured.
The local council search showed up the FENSA (double glazed windows in 2010) application, which is good news, but nothing else. The solicitor appears to be a waste of time and seems to have missed the fact that there has been a massive refurb on the place! I hope now she is doing her job and attempting to locate some paper work.
I am so confused with the Indemnity Insurance issue, which we had been lead to believe was the answer to no building reg paper work, but now seems to be 'not worth the paper it is written on'.
The main worry is that even if we are prepared to live in a house that has not been 'signed off', what happens when we come to sell......? I don't like the thought of having it hanging over our heads the whole time we are living there. It's 4 months since we made the offer and feel not much further forward. The vendor says she doesn't know when the building works took place. She has only been there for 2 years. The people she bought it off where there for only 2 years also. So apart from the council search showing the FENSA application in 2010, we have no other information. We had a 'Homebuyers Survey' which only advised that the solicitor should chase up the building regs. We really like it, it is affordable, the only one we have found in 6 months of looking. I don't think PP was needed, as it is interior work(?)
Should/can we insist that she gets a retroactive building certificate, a 'regularisation' cert? Should she/we get a structural engineer/surveyor to take a look? Should we walk away from it?
I didn't realise house buying was quite so stressful, or quite so insane!

All the indemnity does is insure against local authority action. It's of no use if the work turns out to be unsafe. I'd be running away from a major renovation that had no building regs at all. Who knows what bodges might have been done.

I'd walk away, it sounds unmortgageable/unsaleable.

Ask them to get a structural survey done.

It probably wouldn't have needed planning permission as you say but building regs definitely as walls were removed.
I had some work done around then and my builders didn't tell me I should have building regs either. Buiding regs ensures it is done to certain standards, these standards would be met by decent builders with or without sign off so there is every chance it will be fine - mine was. A structural survey should confirm if the upper floor is properly supported which is the main risk I would think from what you describe.
You can also get electrical and gas safe certificates done, which your vendor should pay for. (potentially around a couple of hundred each. I'm not sure how much the structural survey would cost). These are pretty good at finding if there are any problems with the wiring or gas supply - but will cost more if issues are found.

Buiding regs ensures it is done to certain standards, these standards would be met by decent builders with or without sign off so there is every chance it will be fine - mine was.

I'd argue that decent builders would get all the proper paperwork signed off!

Where's the kitchen? Upstairs or down?

It's a nightmare waiting to happen. Think very carefully before buying this house.
I just sold a house with no building regs and it's been an utter nightmare from beginning to end.
Indemnity insurance is only valid is you don't tell anyone there are no building regs and you just plan on living in the house and not doing anything about it, that includes the local council.
If you go to the local council after you buy the house to try and get building regs signed off the indemnity insurance is completely invalidated.
It only works if the council somehow finds out there are no building regs and come after you for it. Then you are covered as you haven't approached them.
This means that the council can then say you can't have the work signed off and you must put everything back the way it was costing you many thousands of pounds.
They might also say the work is ok and sign it off but you don't know that. It's a massive risk as building regs are very complex.
When you go to sell the house nobody will touch it with a barge pole.
It turned out the extension on my old house had never been signed off. My ex husband said he had sorted it, he hadn't.
Selling it involved finding a buyer who was prepared to work with me. It had to be signed off before the sale as the buyer couldn't get buildings insurance without it being signed off which was a condition of his mortgage.
Building regs lady came over and had a list of things that had to be done before it could be signed off. It cost me 10k, the buyer did the work and I took 10k off the asking price.
Then it was finally signed off and the house was sold but it was a massive hassle and took many months.
I had got a new job in the meantime miles away and was paying rent and mortgage for months. The stress was awful.
Do not buy this house unless the seller is prepared to get the work signed off before you purchase it.

You can ask the vendor to get retrospective building regs.

It's up to the owner to get building control sign off at the time of the build. Gas and elec certs are easy to get. A retroactive building cert is easy enough to get but building control may ask that you expose some areas to check that the works been done correctly, Use all this info to drive the price down. This isn't a huge deal but may work to your advantage as the seller doesn't know what they're doing

Did this not come up when the vendor bought? Why has she only stayed 2 years? Gas and electrical safety certs are not really a big deal assuming everything seems to work okay, but building regs is a massive issue. For it to have taken 4 months to get to this point I would pull out and sack off your conveyancer too. That is outrageous. Building regs is so simple to get at the time of building, but an actual nightmare afterwards and they would absolutely need the plasterboard etc ripped off to inspect the steel supports. It’ll be messy and costly and it’s something the vendor should be doing before marketing.

You can ask the vendor to get retrospective building regs

You can, but the building inspector may need to rip the house apart to confirm compliance with the regs.

Is it possible that the work was done so long ago before building regs were a thing? Or before decent records were kept and people have lost paperwork through various sales?

I once had to sell an old house I’d inherited and the buyers solicitor questioned the lack of building regs for the removal of a chimney breast which as far as I was aware had been removed 60 years previously. There was a lintel in place, the house hadn’t fallen down in 60 years, it was structurally sound.

We bought our current house 6 years ago after it had gone through a large renovation by the previous owners. We could see the planning permission online but the owner could not produce the building regulations certificate.

We insisted on seeing the building reg cert in order to proceed with the purchase and the owner ended up getting retrospective building regs from the council. It only took them a couple of weeks to get it so not too much effort required - she had to make an appointment for them to come round to sign everything off. No doubt she had to pay!

Please don't buy the property without the building regs sign off, for your safety and any future sale.

You might as well ask for a building regs regularisation. Our house didn't have one fir work done by the vendors, but they did have the structural calculations and photos of the work in progress and the building inspector signed it off without pulling anything apart. It sounds like your property is a bit more unusual but they might as well try if they want to sell.

When was the structural work done?
If it is recently then they are being dodgy.
If it was ages and ages ago, well in a 130 year old house... You can't expect too much...
But for such significant structural works... I would want some proof it was all sound.

The vendors can ask the council for building regs, if they were passed.

How long about was it done, approx? If within 20 years council will have it, maybe in archives so will take a little while to retrieve.

Gas & Electrical could be certified now?

Thanks to you all for your responses, I was feeling like the hamster on the wheel....and now feel a little clearer.
The vendor has no idea when the work was done, she is a single parent of 2 boys, she says she wants to move so they can have their own rooms. She seems really stressed, so I am avoiding talking directly about any issues, I just thought her EA would have given her some better advice.
We are now writing a 'stern' letter to our useless solicitor, saying we don't want Indemnity, we want to get 'regularisation' from the local council.
The oil central heating has at least been serviced which is great!

Cheers

How did you find out about the renovation work?

We’ve got no building regs sign off for our extension. We had planning permission etc and the building inspector monitored progress but it was very common when it was done for a Certificate not to be given.

We are selling so our builder contacted the building inspector who he is still in contact with and was told they weren’t interested in work done in 2005, all the files have been sent to another place and they rarely provided certs back then. So we will take out insurance.

OK so if she is claiming that she didn't do the work, and bought the house this way, she would have had the same conversation when she bought it. When was that?
Regularisation means ripping stuff open and she would be stupid to allow that without a bit of a fuss. Its messy and wil cost her money. You might make yourself too much hassle as a buyer!

@Comefromaway, the council will have records from that time and at least verbally confirm it was signed off. I had work done around that time and definitely got a cert as by then it was quite an established process. Speak to the council as buyers will demand it and the indemnity does not cover issues with the work.

The house we are buying doesn’t have one either. The building inspector says he remembers our work (he knows the builder quite well) and knows it was done well but it was never formally signed off. A different authority deals with it now (we are in an area where the town council deals with some stuff and the county other stuff and they sent their records to archive in a third place. If we want it signed off formally it will cost a lot of money.

Quite honestly it's tough shit if she is stressed. She must have known when she bought it that this was the case and now she needs to face the music or lose the sale.
After my own extension fiasco I went on to buy a grade 2 listed property at a very nice price.
ONE WEEK before exchange of contracts my solicitor discovered extensive work done without grade 2 list permission, she had tried to hide it from everyone.
I dropped that one like a hot cake, that work would never have been signed off. The estate agent who admitted to being a good friend of hers also tried to hide it from me. It cost me £900 in surveys and fees.
I reported them to their governing body, they haven't replied yet.
I went on to buy a modern cottage, it seemed less hassle all told.

About 30 years ago we bought a house that didn't have planning permission for the kitchen extension or building regs approval for a wall that had been knocked down. Both had been done over 10 years before we bought it.

The LA issued building regs approval retrospectively and wrote to say that they would not do anything about the lack of planning permission. It slowed things down when we were buying the house but it wasn't an issue when we subsequently sold it.

If you really want it get a full structural survey done and get a new solicitor !