Buying property with 'illegal' extensions

[Pegs11]

Hi, my partner and I are buying a property - a stone cottage, built around 1910 I believe. The current owner has been there 50 years and the property has been lovingly improved over the decades and is on the whole very well maintained... BUT we have encountered a couple of hiccups and I have two questions for you lot to see what you think! Trying to get a consensus here...

First part of question:

We are mid-way through the process and it turns out the vendors have no paperwork for the three extensions (and a knock-through) they did in the 1980s/1990s.

We had a level 3 survey done and the surveyor said that while the extensions would certainly not conform to modern building regs due to their age, he could see no signs of them being structurally unsound, and as they've been standing for so long, it's unlikely that they would be unsafe. But that without getting a structural engineer in, it's impossible to know for sure.

I don't think we can get a structural engineer in at this stage - the vendor would need to agree to invasive work being done and I can't see them doing that. The extensions were done too long ago for us to be able to get retrospective planning/building regs (ie, regularisation).

Our concern is around the potential for issues when reselling the property in the future. We don't plan to stay there forever and would hate to be in a situation where we struggle to sell it because of the illegal work that has been done to it and the lack of safety certificates. If WE are having doubts, how likely is it that future potential buyers will also have doubts...? I don't know if we are especially cautious buyers... perhaps most people would be more chilled out about it or perhaps wouldn't consider it an issue at all?

Second part of question:

The house has had some other questionable work done over the years. In the garden, they built a brick workshop with cement floor over a public sewer, without permission. They also put a brick porch out front, which is in breach of either planning rules or a restrictive covenant (or both), and they created a driveway with hardstanding without permission and without a dropped kerb, and the surveyor said there could be public pipes etc running under it and that the council might take issue with that (although they haven't so far).

We can get indemnities for all of these things, but would that be satisfactory for most people? And again, we are concerned about selling the property in the future with these issues in place.

Please let me know your thoughts on both of these questions. Would you buy this house?!

You can get retrospective building regs after all this time
Ask the sellers to secure it
They’ll struggle to sell anyway without it and if building control need holes dug etc to check the foundations that’s not your problem.

In terms of the driveway it’s only more recently that permission is needed to put one in. It’s down to drainage issues

If your conveyancer thinks there are pipe runs underneath I’d ask him why he thinks this. After all, he’s the one doing all the searches so he should have evidence of services under the land

You've all raised some really pertinent questions, thank you, and my partner and I will definitely be bringing some of these queries to our conveyancer and the vendor's estate agent. It's certainly not quite the house we thought we were being sold.

It it is reflected in the price, I would.

We have bought&sold several ‘odd’ properties in the past as it allowed us to have twice the surface we would with a ‘normal property’. Maisonette above a restaurant, house with subsidence, this type of things.

As an owner of a house formerly owned by a bodger DIYer, I would think again with this one. It's not the building work done inside without paperwork that's the issue, it's all other stuff done that doesn't seem to meet common sense applications. Work that's been done by someone who isn't competent - and these jobs don't sound like they have - would send me screaming over the horizon.

Unless there are no houses available that meet your requirements, I'd keep looking. You can get indemnity policies without too much trouble, but it's all the hidden stuff that you don't know about yet that will cause you the most headaches.