House listed as 4 bed is actually 3 bed

[RanchRat]

Have had our offer accepted on a 4 bed house. The survey came back yesterday with the info that there are no building regs for the 4th (attic) bedroom and it is not proertly insulated.
AIBU to balk at paying the 4 bed premum for a 3 bed property. The house next door (other half of the semi) and is a 3 bed is on the market for £50,000 less. I like the house but don't want to be out of pocket. WWYD.

As it doesn’t have building regs the first thing you need to establish is if it’s safe to use the attic room, if someone unqualified has done the work and bodged it you could end up with a hefty bill to put it right and be living in a potentially unsafe house. Building regs can be applied for, and granted retrospectively, but I’d want to be sure that the work was satisfactory.

Yup, I’m aware of how the policies work. What do you suppose the OP will be using that room as? If as a bedroom and the bank valuation is in line with whatever they have offered, I’d probably crack on with the indemnity policy. Local councils don’t go around demanding loft extensions are ripped out, they don’t have the manpower. Equally the OP could buy the house nextdoor and fork out the 70k for a loft extension with building regs. Sounds like a waste of cash to me, an indemnity policy is approximately £300.

Is it a proper structural survey? No building regs and not properly insulated - I'd be worried it's dangerous and I'd pull out.

Either that or the solicitor has to take out an insurance indemnity policy, but this doesn’t protect against a reduction in value on resale - it just means the council can’t come after you for planning permission in retrospect.

We had no problem getting a ‘3 bedroom’ mortgage on a terraced house that had converted the attic (pre regs) and was classed as a bedroom. The mortgage report itself said 3 bedroom and didn’t even mention the fact that there were no building regs for attic room. Same for the people that bought the house from us. Lots of terraced houses in our area are similar.

This. I also thought you couldn’t sell without getting the right building regs but I’m not knowledgeable on this. All I know is my DB didn’t market his “converted attic” as a room because he did it himself (a tradie, just not builder) because it wasn’t done to regs.

i also remember my BIL having problems, he took over his ex partners mortgage with her when she divorced. He hadn’t realised that the ex husband had done loads of work without official regs on the house until they split up and it came to selling. BIL had to get it all sorted just to before he could sell and was out of pocket due to it.

We had this happen and pulled out. The owners and estate agents wouldn't accept that it wasn't a 4 bed.

A huge red flag for us was that the building work had been done in more recent times when buildings regs were definitely a thing.

I wouldn't touch it, not worth the hassle. There will be other houses.....

The difference being that yours met the building regulations required at the time it was done (i.e none). If the conversion was done more recently and building regulations should have been adhered to but weren’t, then that’s where the problem is.

We bought our house as a 3 bed (including attic bedroom), several years later we had the house valued by someone from the same estate agents who told us they couldn’t class the attic room as a bedroom as it wasn’t to code!

Sorry if I’ve missed it - I didn’t see that she had clarified that the attic was converted when building regs were required. The 3rd bedroom at our old terraced house was highlighted as not having building regs bit after further investigations it was found that it was built pre regs so I wondered if OP was still at the initial stage.

Thats not right, you can extend into the attic following the (many) building regs, ceiling height, door sizes, stairs, insulation, spec of the beams and joists, and so on and its a bedroom. Otherwise its still a loft space. Most house adverts make this distinction and the house is priced accordingly

Let us know how you get on OP. I would have done the same

They won't accept an offer based on the three bed price as the work of building the conversion is done. I think you need to offer somewhere in the middle or say that you will honor the original asking price if the loft room is insulated and paperwork is produced.

House round my way has this issue where a room was created in the loft best part of 20+ years ago without building regs. It has recently come on the market and the room in the loft was described as a 'hobby room'

No. It’s common knowledge that you should have building regulations to advertise it as an extra bedroom and if you have that it’s classed as a bedroom not “a nice attic”!. No grey area at all!

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I fully agree with @Doris86 in answer to your predicament.

This happened to the house next door to my mother. It was originally a 3 bed semi detached house when it was snapped up by a builder.

He did so much work on it; extended out and up. Put in a huge kitchen extension, a games room for the kids and added 2 further bedrooms and en-suites.

Unfortunately, when he came to sell it due to his marriage split, it was discovered that he had not applied for planning permission for any of these changes.

The outcome was that he had to readvertise it as an 3 bedroomed property, as he was too stubborn to pay for retrospective planning permission.

He made a huge loss, from the initial valuation, but the new owners had to do significant works to make good on what were very superficial improvements.

Exact same thing happened to us. We dropped the offer by the value of the extra bedroom and that offer was accepted.
In the end we had to completely rip out the attic room and completely redo it.

Not read the whole thread but tbh with loft conversions my first thought would be: is it up to spec. Estate agent spiel or Rightmove descriptions are worthless here. A direct question to the vendor at point of offer would save you a lot of disappointment.

If the vendor has tried to obscure this and let it go to a survey to point out lack of regs well that’s them being chancers to an extent. But at the same time, you’ve always got to be wary re quality and regs of any recently done works.

In our case as first time buyers it didn’t occur to us that there would be any issue with the attic, it looks fine and nothing was flagged in the survey to say otherwise, I believe the only problem is the staircase is too steep (which is what the estate agent who came to value it said). As far as I know the work was done in the 70s.

Not true in the case of older loft extensions done before building regs were a thing, ie around 1984.

I once considered buying a house with a loft conversion without building regs. My builder said to get the retrospective permissions would require nearly as much work, and be as expensive, as doing the conversion from scratch.

If you offer as a 3 bed expect to have to have what is there ripped out and to start again if you need the fourth bedroom.
We had a storage room built in our loft with a staircase for easy access. We hoped to allow our teenage son to use the room for extra space but this didn't happen. We discovered when we tried for building regs sign off that it was actually classed as an illegal loft conversion. To have it removed has cost us £4000 after paying £12000 for original work. It can invalidate house insurance and mortgage lenders may not lend on it if selling.
To do a proper loft conversion in our area is £50k at least. May be wise to walk away.

Building regscover all sorts for a loft conversion. We had to have our open staircase enclosed and fire doors installed for example. It’s not just a piece of paper, it confirms the room (and house) are safe to inhabit.