How much to attempt to negotiate off sale price?

[Bodgejobvendors]

We had agreed a price on a house in a buoyant London market. Both sides happy with where we’d ended up but I know it was £25k less than the vendor originally wanted and £25k more than the reduced price that enticed us to view.

We could see immediately there was a bit of a crappy recent kitchen extension but hoped it was cosmetic. Subsequently the vendors haven’t been able to produce building regs certs, and so far have tried to deny doing any building work, but our solicitors are in contact with theirs.

Mortgage lender happy but now our survey has come back and confirmed that it won’t meet building regulations. The surveyor says the work is poor quality and it’s revealed an issue we didn’t spot on the viewing.

Part of me wants to go all out and seek a c. £50k reduction to recognise the cost of demolition and rebuild (which would end up in excess of this anyway). But I’m pessimistic about the vendor agreeing to anything as stock round here is still so limited and prices are still going up. I feel like we’ve stuffed as their aren’t other houses to walk away to and we do need to move urgently for a few good reasons. But I’m so worried that they’ve built something completely jerry-built and surely they have to accept the consequences of that?

How would you go about negotiating on price?

I would definitely negotiate on the price! Surely they will keep having the same issue if other buyers are having surveys done?

When was the non-compliant extension built and what's the issue the survey has shown?

Don't knowingly buy a lemon. An entire extension that wouldn't meet regs is significant. What exactly is wrong with it?

It’s an area where lots of buyers do major refurbs immediately on buying so there may be people who are planning to knock the whole thing down anyway and don’t care. But yes I agree they need to accept this a problem for anyone. They purchased as a private sale at significantly below market value from a relative, so I think all sorts of problems have been shored up and they are naive about the normal way or buying and selling property.

They have so far refused to say when it was built but it’s clearly recent.

The survey says we need to get a structural engineer to look at it to determine if it’s stable. They can confirm it doesn’t meet building regs and the work is described as “generally in poor condition”.

If the extension is visible from the street if you look on google maps you can view the street in different years to see when the extension was added! That's handy for working out when things were built :)

Sounds to me like the seller should be willing to reduce the price based on your survey results, if it's shoddy work and will need rebuilding then they can't expect full price :(

I would honestly move on. They will likely remarket and wait til they find a buyer that doesn't have a survey done.
They are not going to be honest, you can fork out all you like on engineer's etc but it's a sellers market at the moment.