Buyers Beware of property HIGH flood risk - check using link in thread

[desperatelyseekingnoone]

Hi all, hoping those who have lived in or used to live on a street with High risk of surface water flooding can advise.

I’m looking at a property I quite like and doing my own research of the street. It’s a quiet street, mainly retired and young families, quite middle class and the property is really nice.

i put the address in the gov site that tells you about the risk of flooding. it’s come back “high” risk for surface water flooding, and that this is a high risk eg afters lots of rain and I’m assuming the drains are rubbish on the street.

i’m contacting the local council for more info eg has the area actually had this problem, have people’s property been affected and to what degree etc. still waiting for a response.

i just dont know if the property is too high risk and if people look at this when buying? I certainly do just because i dont want my property to be flooded (kinda obvious!) but also I don’t want to deal with a flood either.

has anyone had any experience of this, in anyway, just to help me figure this out. Did you buy a property in a high risk of surface flooding area?

Thanks so much

Mine came up on the search as at risk of surface water flooding (can't remember if it was high or not). Neighbours told me no floods. I think its just we are down hill from a large road area, when it rains the rain just rushes by as we are higher than the street and still on a hill. I guess we may have some risk from the drains? I think you can get some sort of one way valve put on your drain so I might do that?

Hi @desperatelyseekingnoone I work for the EA in flood risk management. Could you send me the postcode of the property you are considering?

You might find that the council has since taken action to reduce the risk. That's the case here, they've done remedial work to separate out surface and foul water, to free up capacity in the foul drains.

Mine did. It's near a ditch and the grass gets soggy sometimes but nowhere near the house so I'm not worried.

Don't buy it. Surface water flooding is becoming much more common as we experience more extreme weather events.

Can you find out from the Council or environment agency why it got the high rating? They must have some evidence to have given it that rating on their flood maps. Might be worth asking their planning department? If it's due to blocked or broken drains then it might be OK if it gets on the Councils work list of things to get fixed? If it's at the bottom of hill and all the road drainage heads that way, I'd steer clear.

Get an insurance quote, some properties in areas of high risk are crazy expensive to insure even if they never flooded. You get get a quote on any property, so can so a comparison for a similar house outside the High risk area to see what it's going to cost you.

Surface flooding is predicted to increase in the future thanks to more intense storms, but also the maps are crap in many places! If there is any natural low point or body of water that could overflow it might be one to avoid though.

hey all, thanks so much for responding. I really like the property, but my husband wants to pass on it. he really can't be bothered with a high risk area and just feels it's not worth it given other issues like energy bills and costs going up up up for us. I know insurance would deal with it, but as PP says, insurance would probably be expensive, especially if some rebuild and reconstruction needed - cost of materials is awful right now.

And I then thought, if it did flood, what if it happened in the middle of winter. it would be a disaster. I agree with others, it's not something i will pursue as we just don't have the means to deal with it if it happened, financially and emotionally.

I know there are areas that are high risk and never flooded, but i'm a bit of a worrier. if we bought it, i'd always wonder and plague my mind about it.

thank you again everyone!!

Just to add, we were looking in our village and happened to do a flood risk search out of curiosity for what it said. It said high risk for surface water, even though we knew for 30 years there had been not even a bad puddle situation in that area. Asked some of the elders of the village and they were also baffled. After this, I didn't trust the rating and asked on the village Facebook group or neighbors re flooding if I was interested in anywhere

Hi, what website did you use for this please OP?

Hi, it's this:

https://www.gov.uk/check-long-term-flood-risk

Thank you

We were going to buy a house with high surface water flooding. We asked the sellers if the house had ever flooded. They said no. We then met the neighbours on the way out and they told us that the house had flooded in 2012. Be careful and ask about

Oh really, thank you so much for sharing! it's so... weird?

I have absolutely no idea what to think. But I'll wait for the council to respond to us and let you know what they've told us about the property we were interested in.

we feel as buyers, we can't go off much except these sites to help us (link above). I'd rather not pay a lot of money to a solicitor to do these searches to just give us the same results, i'd just rather pass on the property! sellers really need to check their property risk as buyers will be checking for these and they should really be forthcoming about whether they've had flooding or not, to help people out.

Thank you so much, I literally just wrote a comment above saying how sellers have to be forthcoming. Tbh, if we had been lied to by the seller, I would always ask my solicitor to do a search and check, even if it was low risk. but since the gov site (link above) says it's already High risk (out of very low risk, low, medium, high, very high scale), so we've decided it's a no, there's no point in entertaining it.

I hope this thread has been useful to other buyers. and also sellers to check their property against the site because buyers will be checking :)

@desperatelyseekingnoone and @Replyingtoyou The EA flood maps show the theoretical possibility of flooding based on the 100 year storm. This is a storm of magnitude that is likely to be exceeded only once on every hundred years. Flood modelling is a bit of a black art, because there are so many variables to consider that change all the time - ground saturation (or soil moisture deficit), how clear the river channel is, how close rain storms are in time, development/changes in land usethe presence and location of flood defences... (in England, where present, these are generally designed to protect against no more than the 100 year storm). Every flood incident skews the statistics though.

Modellers are very clever people, and look at many scenarios, but there is a limit to their vision into the future!

Sadly, through the course of my work (fEA flood risk engineer) I have met an awful lot of people who have lived somewhere for decades and hadn't seen it flood until they did.

Surface water flooding is different - mist public drainage is designed to take a 40 year storm.

Then there's tides...

I'm sure they are the cleverest people for sure, and definitely, I would expect this all to be based on science, risk factors and mathematical probability.

It's really never easy predicting anything. I also used the maps you mentioned, if it is the same one, they show the elevation off the ground, some areas of the town we are looking at are higher than others, and I assume that's good for flooding. They used different colours for the different elevations.

I am also very concerned about the climate and feel we in the UK are doing nothing to make things better. Sunak just reversed a whole load of things that would have helped, so I think most buyers need to err on the side of caution.

And agree 100%. It's difficult to predict anything. We can only go off what information we have at the time.

If it's like the SEPA maps (Scotland), you need to make a judgement based on the specific location of the house. It may be that the roads in the area flood but not the house itself.

SEPA says a 50m radius of our house has a high degree of surface flooding. This is true of the road but not the house (as the house is built on a hill - about 7 feet above the road). And it's correct: when we get the major downpours (which are no longer ever 100 years, now more like twice a year ) the road does flood, as in, the drains don't cope and the road is about 10-15cm deep in water, often covering the pavement and even partly up the drive.

Essentially, the old Victorian storm drains can't cope with the sheer volume of water. But it drains away quickly and none of the houses are at risk.

Last week, our postie ended up driving his van along the fortunately very wide pavement as the road in our bit of the street was so deep in water.