problems following our house purchase!!

MissMotivation

poppysarah wrote: »

Your mortgage company let you buy a rotten damp house? Don't they noramally insist on a survey?

There was a survey carried out, just so happened to be the cheapest kind, a mortgage valuation which is very basic!

OP there is nothing that you can do now I'm afraid, you have been there for a year, who is to say that the damp problems havn't started since you've lived there.

It's a lesson learnt for the next time you purchase. Always, always, always have a Homebuyers Report!

sthelensdanielle

the damp had been plastered over so thats y it took an entire year to show, but the rate in which the damp formed once it orginally presented a problem showed that it had been covered up and had not only began to form in the year that we had been there and thats what i meant by severe! the house was a total refurb and we paid extra to have a house that needed no work done to it so this situation is extremely disappointing! as we have a one year old son we arent even living there at the moment until the damp has totally gone. surely this is not our fault and someone is to blame here??

markelock

you want someone to blame legally.

the previous owner sounds like a liar, and morally he was wrong to do that, but unless he made written representations to the effect of the property having a damp proof course/membrane, then who's to say what actually happened, and more importantly, how do you prove what he said.

I'd say, live and learn. next time do it differently

You won't be the only ones who this has happened to.

QTPie

sthelensdanielle wrote: »

the damp had been plastered over so thats y it took an entire year to show, but the rate in which the damp formed once it orginally presented a problem showed that it had been covered up and had not only began to form in the year that we had been there and thats what i meant by severe! the house was a total refurb and we paid extra to have a house that needed no work done to it so this situation is extremely disappointing! as we have a one year old son we arent even living there at the moment until the damp has totally gone. surely this is not our fault and someone is to blame here??

Unfortunately it is... You really should have had a full survey done: that would have picked up the damp and the lack of a suitable damp course.

Many people choose not to have a full survey done (and opt for the minimum - basically a valuation report) because it is considerably cheaper. However, if you make that choice, then you take a big risk. You just CANNOT take a property vendor's word that he has done everything properly... you need an independent, expert survey.

Sorry - an expensive lesson to learn

QT

Doozergirl

sthelensdanielle wrote: »

the damp had been plastered over so thats y it took an entire year to show, but the rate in which the damp formed once it orginally presented a problem showed that it had been covered up and had not only began to form in the year that we had been there and thats what i meant by severe! the house was a total refurb and we paid extra to have a house that needed no work done to it so this situation is extremely disappointing! as we have a one year old son we arent even living there at the moment until the damp has totally gone. surely this is not our fault and someone is to blame here??

As has already been said, it is always 'caveat emptor' when it comes to house buying. It is your responsibility to check that it is sound.

Firstly when the "developer" (big sigh) said he'd put in a damp proof course, you needed to ask for the certificate. It's usual that your solicitor will ask for all guarantees etc to be provided. If you thought there was a damp proof course, there should have been a specification and a guarantee with that.

Secondly, when you ask you lender to go out and look at the property, they are doing it purely for their own purposes. They are looking to see that the house provides enough security to lend on. They are not surveying the house for you and will only see what the naked eye sees. If you wanted the house surveyed to check that the work carried out was all good, you should have commissioned at least a homebuyers report - that is for you and that will provide more than a cursory glance over the property.

If you had bought a house from me, it would have come with a raft of guarantees, building control approval, and certificates showing what work had been carried out and showing that work had been carried out by approved contractors. You'd also get my husband's telephone number so that if anything goes wrong in the first year, he'll organise the tradesperson to come back in and fix it.

It isn't your fault that there is damp, but I'm afraid it is your fault that you failed firstly to make sure you got guarantees and secondly to have the building surveyed. As it stands, you just took someone's word for it.

Sorry.

sthelensdanielle

thanks for all your replies, even though its not what i wanted to hear . its a hard lesson to learn but we'll know next time i suppose. we didnt know what the survey/ valuation involved as we are first time buyers and we had the basic survey done on the reccommendation of our estate agent.
as my father in law has a building firm we chose to use his services rather than claim on our insurance, as we didnt want our payments to rocket following a claim. but once we started the work we uncovered more and more problems and thats why it has ended up costing us sooo much! does anyone know wether insurance companied to allow you to reclaim expenses of work in areas that is covered by the insurance we have? even though the work has been carried out (we are still doing it now and all other work has been done recently). we would have claimed on the insurance originally but we did not realise the extent to which this idiot cut corners!
thanks x

poppysarah

Would your insurance cover this sort of previous problem?

QTPie

sthelensdanielle wrote: »

we didnt know what the survey/ valuation involved as we are first time buyers and we had the basic survey done on the reccommendation of our estate agent.

The estate agent that you were buying the house from? The estate agent who acts on the behalf of the seller (and not the buyer)? The estate agent whose interests it probably wouldn't be in for you to get a full survey?

If so, bad advice to accept . It is the equivalent of going to buy a second hand car from a dodgy second hand car dealler and taking their advice that "a full independent vehicle check" really isn't necessary before you buy it...

I THINK that you will be VERY out of luck trying to claim retrospectively on the problems. When you want to make a claim like this, the first thing that will happen is that the insurance company will send someone around to survey the problem (a good surveyor should have seen the extent of the problem or at least you would have been covered if it escalated), then get quotes etc. Since they now cannot assess the original problem or tell whether quotes were fair, I just don't think they will even consider paying out. You could try, but I think that you are on to a looser

QT

maninthestreet

sthelensdanielle wrote: »

thanks for all your replies, even though its not what i wanted to hear . its a hard lesson to learn but we'll know next time i suppose. we didnt know what the survey/ valuation involved as we are first time buyers and we had the basic survey done on the reccommendation of our estate agent.
as my father in law has a building firm we chose to use his services rather than claim on our insurance, as we didnt want our payments to rocket following a claim. but once we started the work we uncovered more and more problems and thats why it has ended up costing us sooo much! does anyone know wether insurance companied to allow you to reclaim expenses of work in areas that is covered by the insurance we have? even though the work has been carried out (we are still doing it now and all other work has been done recently). we would have claimed on the insurance originally but we did not realise the extent to which this idiot cut corners!
thanks x

So your FIL is a builder, but you didn't ask him to perform any sort of informal inspection of this house himself before you bought it? Although he is probably not a qualified surveyor, being a builder he may well have spotted things weren't quite as the vendor had told you - any builder worth his salt would know how to check that a house has a DPC installed. At the very least, it might have prompted you to pay for a more in-depth survey, that probably would have then uncovered the underlying issues with damp.

dacouch

If you have Domestic Legal Protection Cover it often includes cover to sue the professionals involved in the purchase of a house. It is normally subject to you having the policy running for a certain period before its covered often 180 days.

If you do not have it then your Home Insurance will often include free legal advice, the number is normally next to the number to ring for a normal claim in your policy booklet