No building regs - and long crack

[NCHouseBuy]

Hi all - I'm buying a semi with an L shape open plan living, dining and kitchen. It is absoutely lovely, I'm at the last stages, have the mortgage, about to exchange 🥳...turns out it doesn't have building regs 🤦‍♀️ and I've now found a fine lateral crack running right across the middle of the opened living/diner. I've found more cracks in the bathroom ceiling upstairs - right above that running downstairs.

Help me - how bad is this? Is there any hope this is just the house settling (and therefore is it worth paying to get a structural engineet in to look at it)? Or is this - to those in the know - a lost cause?

Thanks everyone...argh🤦‍♀️

The vendors need to go back to their own surveyor, if they had one done and these problems weren't picked up.

There are definitely weaknesses in the conveyancing process. Our vendor lied about major works on the legal form. Maybe when you instruct a solicitor when buying a property early on in the process they should ask if you believe there have been any changes made to the property. It would be a start for them to look out for during the process. The buyer has visited the house, done some research and spoken to the agent who may also have revealed some detail not obvious to a conveyancer looking at paperwork. EA's love to big up new boiler, electrics, extensions, room layout changes etc so that information is really valuable to the conveyancing process but not always passed on.

EAs dimly don’t know about load bearing walls. Buyers need surveys. The current owners might not have bothered with a survey. That’s their problem. Yes, they now need to sort this out.

In older houses with single brick walls, how the beam is mounted is vital. An engineer would look at all of this when looking at the design. If the vendors won’t get this sorted they won’t sell I would have thought. Unless to someone else who doesn’t get a survey.

It's up to the surveyor to flag up if there have been alterations and then the solicitor to check if the necessary consents are in place

google earth pro
you can download it for free you can than (read instructions I can't explain but I have done this) work the aerial photographs back through years (they are done in set time periods) & you should be bale to identify approx when work was done
Its quite an interesting bit of software - useful for all sorts of things

Update: The vendors declined to obtain regularisation, so I've withdrawn from the purchase. I feel terrible for them, but I'd be daft to take the house off their hands, turn myself into this house's future vendor and end up right in their shoes. Ultimately, the house simply isn't what it was advertised as, and I'd never even have viewed had I known, let alone offered on it.

Thanks all very much for all the advice and support - you were all so helpful in weighing up to make a very important and difficult decision at the 11th hour.

I think that's the right call. Maybe the vendors know that getting everything signed off isn't going to be as straightforward as they might have implied to you.

You have made the right decision.

@NCHouseBuy

Update: The vendors declined to obtain regularisation, so I've withdrawn from the purchase. I feel terrible for them, but I'd be daft to take the house off their hands, turn myself into this house's future vendor and end up right in their shoes. Ultimately, the house simply isn't what it was advertised as, and I'd never even have viewed had I known, let alone offered on it.

Thanks all very much for all the advice and support - you were all so helpful in weighing up to make a very important and difficult decision at the 11th hour.

I completely empathise. Just going through the same thing at the 11th hour and now having to face finding a rental in January. At least your vendors were ignorant, mine should know better and led us a merry dance to the 11th week into the process before he revealed a total lack of building regs into the huge remodelling project. My only compensation is he’ll never be able to sell it.

It always comes back to bite them, the people who believe that rules don't apply to them.