Year a house was built???

black-saturn wrote:

Same here too. Says mine was built in 1920 but actually it was built in 1896.

That'll be the NR32 post code!


I don't know any houses around here that were built in 1920! These are all Victorian terraces.

I think the esure data might come from what previous owners have entered when insuring it - presumably the insurers share that sort of data between them.

I recently bought and the surveyor put "around 60 years old" on the report, presumably from his local knowledge, but I only found out a more specific date (1952) when reading a newspaper article about the sale of the specific houses.

There isn't foolproof any way other than local research. (In my own case quite apart from the date of the first conveyance - 1953 - my next door neighbour but one bought his house new and is still living there and there is a photo in a local history publication he took which shows my house being built.)

With a lot of modern property the Land Registry entries will include reference to a conveyance or transfer by some builder which contained rights and covenants etc. With houses built since say about 1960 the builder would usually sell it straight away so the date of that conveyance or transfer is a pretty good guide to when it was built.

With ex-Council houses the date of that conveyance/transfer won't mean anything because it will only say when it was first sold. The same principle applies to a lot of older property which was originally built for renting - it was often retained by the builder and let out and then his family found in the 1950s and 60s that the rent restriction legislation then applying made it uneconomic to retain the houses so they were sold off perhaps when a tenant died - so the date of the first conveyance (if stated in the Land Registry entries - and it isn't always if it did not impose any new covenants etc).

Before WW2 particularly in areas where larger houses were going to be built it was the often the practice for a landowner to sell plots for building without anything on the plot. The buyer would then build a house to his own specification so often the house would be a year or two younger than the date of that conveyance - but sometimes a builder might hold onto land for a time before building so the date of that first conveyance with covenants and rights would not indicate the date the house was built if only because it would simply convey a the plot of land and not contain the traditional words "together with the messuage or dwellinghouse erected thereon..." Don't ask me what a messuage is!