How do lender valuations work?

[FreeBeeBird]

We offered on an apartmrnt that is priced about 10%-15% more than the average that others in similar buildings in the same road but that is because it’s much more spacious and current owners have extended into the loft recently. This info isn’t captured in old zoopla data so I am a bit concerned about a potential valuation. Do lender surveyors actually go inside a property for valuation or do they just do a quick research online?
I definitely think the place is worth that amount knowing the market well (we have been searching for almost a year now).

Zoopla is not reliable at all as a valuation tool so you would certainly hope that a lender valuation would use a slightly more sophisticated method based on either a physical visit or at the very least taking the current square footage of the property into account.

@Twiglets1 I hope so! So would you have to submit the floorplan to them for when they carry the valuation?

They should have the floor plan from the EA details

Thanks, I didn’t know if they liaised with the EA at all

Varies by lender. Ours surveyed the property inside and out. Some will do a desktop valuation only.

It really depends. Our lender did their own desktop valuation for our first house. For our second they referred it to a valuation company who did either a desktop or a drive-by - we only know they didn’t actually view inside.

Does anyone know if they tend to provide a range rather than a specific price? I.e woukd they say x property can be anything between 500K to 525K?

To provide an example:

• offered 500K on a property, we have 50K deposit so would need 450k mortgage
• our agreement in principle says we can borrow up to 475K
• if the house gets downvalued to say 485K during the valuation, would we still be able to go ahead with the originally offered price (500K) if we can’t renegotiate with seller? I.e would the bank still be able to give us 450K as that’s less than our borrowing max? Or does it mean the max they’d give us is 435K and we need to cover the extra 15K ourselves?