Should I be wary of a house with a stream?

[Stopsnowing]

Which runs alongside the back garden?

This is in a built up area so it is not a river. Just thinking about insurance.

I would check Environment Agency maps for flood risk and if serious about buying it could phone for an insurance quote before making an offer.

Other thing to consider is it may put off some buyers with small children. I would consider it as long as not a flooding risk.

I know two families who lost a child this way. Think carefully OP.

I have one under my house 🤭 comes out at end of garden.

Wouldn’t bother me.

Do you have children? How fenced off is the water?
Check flooding risks too. Do some quotes for insurance.

used to live somewhere similar - insurance asks if there is running water within a certain distance so you need to declare and may up price.

and yes, if children under about 10 you need to fence it off securely.

Have you got kids? If so I wouldn't even go there. You'll never relax and if you can't relax in your own home then what's the point.

Having lived through flooding with a brook behind our house, I'd get a comprehensive flood report done. It is not fun.

It would be my dream to have a stream. However all the caveats above are true. My neighbour has a stream at the edge of the garden, while her DC were little they had sturdy fences which were removed when DC were older. This stream also floods, a little trickle can become a raging torrent. Her house is higher up and the water never reaches it but others along the stream have been flooded.

Interesting. I saw it from the outside. It is more like a concrete channel with some official looking railings etc so it must be a kind of waterway. I will see if it is on a flood map

I checked the govt site and it is high risk of surface water and medium risk of river flooding.

I would not. However often it floods now, it is only going to get much worse. I viewed a house like this. The stream was quite far from the house - big garden. It was very pretty and well fenced off. However when I stood on the lawn close to the house the ground squelched - there hadn't been rain for over a week. Decided against.

We have multiple bits of water.
You need, like every house, strict rules, depending on the age of the child.
We love it, thankfully never had even a near miss.
I had more problems at friends houses with lax rules about sliding down the stairs or jumping off window sills.
It is amazing here and if we move, I will miss having my fresh water dog cleaning stream

The house is right next to a flood measuring station and is in a flood area 3. Insurance came up average but I couldn’t answer the question of whether it had ever been flooded.

Check for historical flooding and secure boundaries.
I spent my childhood in a home backing onto the river lea (very narrow shallow part). We'd go river jumping, tadpole netting. All the local kids would meet there. We were all fine apart from wet socks if we misjudged the jump.

Our last house had a stream running across the garden. It was down quite a dip so the garden never flooded. We, and the dog, loved it and made a real feature of it. Our DC were older so there were no worries on that score.

Flood zone 3 means the property is on the flood plain - I would not consider it at all.

It is such a pity because it is offering a lot of space for the probably but now I know the reason.

Also, just because there is no record of it flooding, that doesn't mean that it hasn't flooded. It's not unknown for property owners to keep quiet, to avoid problems with insurance and selling.

it is possible to live with flooding - you need appropriate flooring downstairs, high level sockets, immediately accessible measures to raise furniture, pumps installed etc etc. I've been reading about a cafe that has the entire kitchen on wheels ready to take up the hill at short notice (this is Shropshire where a combination of a really shit council, excess building and natural floodplains means it happens a lot)

but really - would you want to?

My neighbour has flooded once as did a lot of houses in the village that hadn't ever before.

Since then she's redone the rear patio area, raised her conservatory. She is very unlikely to ever experience it again.
The bottom of the garden floods occasionally, it really isn't a big deal here.
In Herefordshire, as a previous poster says, you would rule out a lot of aces, look at how Monty Don deals with it, I suspect he has few regrets about buying his place.

I've just bought a place with a very low stream at the edge of the back garden - the whole tiny village is deemed high risk for surface water (flash) flooding, low risk for river flooding.

I was able to get a quote from a specialist broker, and it's maybe a little more expensive than a standard policy but not much.

The vendors had lived there for the whole 36 years that the small development has existed, and it hasn't flooded once. We decided to take the risk, as it's not on a flood plain - it just got caught by the new environment agency classifications in 2016 based on mapping, not on flood history. In fact I can benefit from Flood Re, a kind of subsidy deal arranged with insurers by the government to help homeowners suddenly impacted by the classifications even though they've never been flooded.

Our house shows up on flood maps as high risk. It’s not flooded for at least 83 years, even in a major event from 15 years ago when properties in same area (and same flood risk designation) flooded badly. Of course there’s no guarantee that it will never flood. But it doesn’t keep me awake at night. Having the stream is just fabulous, we have otters and kingfishers, and it’s just big enough for a rowing boat.

But, resale will always be an issue, which is incredibly irritating!

We have a stream but the house is 60 feet above it (on a hill). There is no way that it could flood (other than sn end of the world scenario).Even so we have to declare it on the insurance.