Buying house with no building completion certificates

[Omgwtafisthat]

There have been a number of changes made my previous owner to the seller we are dealing with. Ground floor extension, loft conversion and chimney breast and internal wall removal. These would have been done at least 10-15 years ago.

Seller has no certificates for building control at all. Has anyone experienced this?

it’s an old house, and we have had a full structural survey which didn’t raise any concerns specifically but did recommend getting the certs. Outside of the period where you need indemnity insurance but it’s more of a safety point.

solicitors saying it could be a death trap and we would struggle to resell.

We've experienced similar to this. In your shoes I would make any offer subject to the vendor achieving full completion sign off from the LA, including completing, any remedial work required to bring works in line with regs. Is it a listed property? That requires additional certification, which the LA carries out at the same time.

If you are using a mortgage to fund any of the purchase price the lender won't approve the loan without completion certificates.

You can make a simple agreement, via your solicitor, to proceed when the certs are in place. if you are prepared to wait for the process to conclude make the agreement also an exclusivity agreement. The vendor should be delighted to have an interested party if they don't have the certs - most people won't be able to buy, even if they'd like to. This should give you quite a bit of leverage on negotiating the price.

I bought my house in September last year. It had an extension done earlier last year. It came to light just before exchange that there was no building regs sign off. The vendor advised that the builder had told them it was done under permitted development. It wasn't, as the extension was over 3m depth on a semi detached.
Anyway, solicitors advised an indemnity policy would be fine. No issues with the mortgage company. Everything went through smoothly.
We didn't have time to wait for them to get retrospective building regs.

Just to clarify, permitted development relates to planning, which is completely separate from building regs.

If you are using a mortgage to fund any of the purchase price the lender won't approve the loan without completion certificates

That is completely untrue. As far as a mortgage lender is concerned indemnity insurance is perfectly acceptable in place of completions certificates for the majority of cases.

The work has to be signed off. The seller must obtain the certificates before the sale can go ahead. Our seller hadn't had a two storey extension signed off! She was very grumpy that we demanded it, but we did.

solicitors saying it could be a death trap and we would struggle to resell

Solicitors are extremely cautious by nature, and are essentially paid to consider the worst possible case scenario of everything.

They have to point out the worst case scenario as were they not to do so they leave themselves open to accusations of negligence.

It could be a death trap. It could also be absolutely fine.

Obviously the ideal scenario is to have the building regs sign-off.

The search results will tell your solicitor if the local authority whether any visits were made during the work, and it's just the final inspection that was missed, or whether the local authority had no involvement at all.

So the local searches didn’t yield anything at all.

we’ve asked for regularisation certificates which I’m not sure how likely we will get, but thought it was a starting point. The surveyor didn’t flag anything wrong with the extension/loft but they’re obviously cautious too and recommended an invasive survey which the owner obviously wouldn’t agree to, but then we don’t know the extent of any problems if there are any. A total catch 22!

the downstairs extension was built around 2007 - so surely the council should have something in their records?

Don't buy it. If ever you need to sell it no one will want it without those building certificates.

Only if the owners engaged with them. You can do all sorts of things and tell the council nothing, and no one will know.

Our previous house had joys such as a chimney breast removed without support, leading to a roof about to collapse which we only, luckily, discovered when getting our own work done. Totally invisible on a survey but could have been lethal. An indemnity does NOTHING to address the costs of putting that right, or the cost of damage caused when a disaster happens.

Anyone who has done major work in the last twenty years and not got sign off may well not have done the work to building control standards. Any reputable builder will insist on bring them in and getting sign off.