Survey and buyer woes

[shoesaregood]

We accepted an offer on our house in May.

All seemed to be going well, but the buyer is now stating that she has issues with the survey. But she won’t tell us what they are or share the relevant parts of the survey with us.

She’s drip fed ‘damp’ and we sent our damp proofing guarantees over to her conveyancer. It’s still very much within warranty - there’s no visible evidence of damp at all. And no smell. She also said ‘possible asbestos in porch’ our survey from 4 years ago (which we’ve shared with her) didn’t pick it up. The house is old and the porch is not a new addition, so it feels unlikely?!

I think there may be other things too, but she won’t disclose them.

I’m not really sure where to go from here. She’s been dithering for a week, not pulling out, but not confirming that she wants to proceed either. I’m not sure why she won’t just share the survey. I’m also not sure that I can take much more waiting and uncertainty.

Tempted to just put the house back on the market, but I don’t want to lose her and subsequently our dream home if I can avoid it!

Any advice on next steps? Should we get our own survey done? Offer to get an aspestos test?

'In the area'? That's very 'broad brush'. Sounds like they are milking it a bit. You could get a specialist in to check, I suppose.
Worth getting the asbestos sorted out if it needs it (it may not depending on where and what it is- it's often best left alone).
Damp work- well, pre-buying we were told we needed about 11 G of work done to this place by a damproof company we paid to do a report. We did let the vendors see the report when they asked, as of course they knew we'd had one, but we didn't ask for anything off for it. When, after buying, we were able to get a more technical firm in to drill through walls for brick samples and do a proper job, there was no rising damp. Just condensation, leaking gutters, etc which was easily solved, and the house has slowly dried out. The other firm's advice would have been catastrophic if we'd taken it- expensive, and would have made it worse.
Some surveyors say there is almost never 'rising' damp.....

Hi OP, these things she are mentioning like the knotweed in the area and potential asbestos are word for word what DD had in her survey about a month ago, sounds like standard surveyor “just in case” wording.

Was it Cornell’s that did the survey?

*Connells

@shoesaregood I’m sorry but your buyers are numpties worrying about you little things, Japanese knotweed in the area WTF I can’t help but think some people make their lives so over complicated.
Just decide if it’s a problem or not and get on with it and sort it out or move on!!

Blue, that’s really interesting about the different damp surveys, thank you! Do you mind telling me how and where you found the more technical people to look at the damp, I’d be really keen to do this.

Speakingfranglais - it wasn’t no, but it was a company who have dreadful Trustpilot reviews.

I just think some people don’t realise that no house will get green lights all the way in a survey.

@shoesaregood

Blue, that’s really interesting about the different damp surveys, thank you! Do you mind telling me how and where you found the more technical people to look at the damp, I’d be really keen to do this.

Speakingfranglais - it wasn’t no, but it was a company who have dreadful Trustpilot reviews.

I just think some people don’t realise that no house will get green lights all the way in a survey.

We used Heritage House, but they tend to do only older properties- ours was about the margin for them at 1920s. The problem with people who install damp proof courses and tank is that they tend to recommend you to install a new DPC and tank, if you get me..... A relative bought a property, and had, on the advice of one of these firms from a survey, a new DPC fitted, by them. A few years later, when he was selling, the same firm came to do a survey for his buyer and said it needed, guess what- a new DPC. That's one of the things that made us wary. HH drilled into the brick from inside, which is one reason we had to wait till we owned the place! They then test the brick dust with a much more sophisticated test. Those pronged things they stick into the wall, well, they are okay for wood, but don't work properly on things like plaster and brick- you can get false readings due to stuff like salts in the plaster, and so on. You can read up a bit here about the general issues with older houses on this link- obviously they are a bit on a mission, but their views are a lot more mainstream now amongst surveyors. www.heritage-house.org/ They found one patch on a wall here where someone had put a waterproof coating on the plaster (possibly because it had once been a downstairs bathroom)- that was the only genuinely intrusive damp place. They suggested we took the sealant layer off and see what happened. It dried out in about a week, no whiff of damp since- it stank before. Sealing and tanking has its place, like where ground levels are high and can't be lowered, but it sure as heck was not on that wall.

To be kind, if you have no idea how much anything costs then surveys on old houses are scary by the time we’d bought we were so desperate to move we just overlooked the entire report and then set money aside to deal with the problems. To be fair our seller had been messed around so much that our tour of the house was like “this is broken” “this is maybe asbestos but we’ve lived with it for 40 years.”

It’s so annoying in England. You could have an offer at x with a buyer who has priced these things in and won’t renegotiate and a higher offer at y that will end up paying less because they over offered on the properties condition.

@purpletrees16

To be kind, if you have no idea how much anything costs then surveys on old houses are scary by the time we’d bought we were so desperate to move we just overlooked the entire report and then set money aside to deal with the problems. To be fair our seller had been messed around so much that our tour of the house was like “this is broken” “this is maybe asbestos but we’ve lived with it for 40 years.”

It’s so annoying in England. You could have an offer at x with a buyer who has priced these things in and won’t renegotiate and a higher offer at y that will end up paying less because they over offered on the properties condition.

Ye, it's tricky. We priced everything in that we could, being reasonably experienced, windows, drive, roofs, etc. but were caught out by the house not having been rewired for so long it still had wire fuses. We'd had a house rewired well over 30 years before because our lender wouldn't lend unless we did, and the house we were offering on had changed hands only about 14 years before, so we'd assumed it had been rewired reasonably recently. Wrong. So we had to drop our offer by a part of the rewiring costs (not all of the cost of the rewire estimate by any means, but still, we did have to drop it a little, and we took a fair hit on it; due to the rewire involving a lot of chasing in and requiring moving the consumer unit to another part of the house as well, it ended up being much more than the estimate we got for the negotiations).