Hi - we’re quite far a long the process in buying a suitable family home for us when it comes to light that the house had subsidence and underpinning was done in 1997.
We’re struggling to get insurance as we don’t have a Certificate of Structural Adequacy as the work was done before this existed. We do however have a Certificate of Practical Completion. We have had a Homebuyers RICS survey and a drainage search and it’s not returned any issue.
We don’t know whether the difficulty in getting insurance (reasonably priced) is a red flag and whether we should walk away?
We weren’t worried before the insurance thing because we thought it has been more than 25 years and there’s no signs of issues and I guess a house that has had it done is a better proposition than one that hasn’t. But now the insurance premiums are sky high it’s causing us to stop and think. We’re going to get a structural engineer to go in and survey that it is indeed historic and nothing current.
We entered into a bidding war with 9 others and it ended up with sealed bids -none of us knew about the historic subsidence - I wonder if we had all known whether there would have been less interest/ we’ve offered to over pay quite substantially!
Finally; the house is okay size wise but our intention was to extend within 2-3 years…we’re now worried we won’t be able to afford to and that the costs will be higher because of underpinning. Has anyone got experience of this ? Will it be more difficult to extend ? More costly?
As always, any help and advice however “obvious” it might be, please share as we’re in unchartered territory here and grateful for any help!