Who pays for any required building work identified in the survey - buyer or vendor?

cattie

I'd never dream of trying to renegotiate price for the sake of £550 worth of work. All houses will need something doing & I'd be overjoyed to find any house I was buying needed such a minor amount of work doing. I'd only seriously think of trying to renegotiate if a house needed over £1k of essential work & hope the vendor would at least meet me half way.

If you are really going to be pushing your financial limits to cover the £550, then you seriously need to consider if you are wise to be buying a house at all.

There is always something needing doing to a property. Boilers break, roofs leak etc. & you need to have a bit of a financial cushion to deal with such things when they occur. Regular maintenance of a property is essential to keep it in good order & repair.

glitterjunkie

Thanks all! I feel a bit stupid for asking now...but like I said, we are FTB's and have never bought a house before, so it's all extremely new to us! Just wanted a bit of advice about what generally happens when repairs need doing, as I genuiunely had no idea who was meant to pay for them. When I bought my car, it turned out the cambelt needed changing and it needed a service and MOT - so the person I was buying it from got it all the work done for me before I bought it. I thought maybe buying a house was similar :rotfl:I guess not though!

Our survey said the house probably needs about £2k of stuff doing to it in total, but most of it is general maintenance stuff which we will happily do ourselves over the next year or so. The £500-worth of stuff was just items which the surveyor specifically said we should get sorted out BEFORE exchanging contracts - hence why I wanted to know whether the vendors would be responsible for it, or us? We didn't want to renegotiate the price, just to see if they'd get the work done before we moved in.

I've actually just got a call from the estate agents - the vendors are willing to meet us halfway, and do one of the jobs themselves (the man is a builder) if we'll pay for the materials So it was worth a try, and I'm quite happy with that I think!

cattie wrote: »

I'd never dream of trying to renegotiate price for the sake of £550 worth of work. All houses will need something doing & I'd be overjoyed to find any house I was buying needed such a minor amount of work doing. I'd only seriously think of trying to renegotiate if a house needed over £1k of essential work & hope the vendor would at least meet me half way.

If you are really going to be pushing your financial limits to cover the £550, then you seriously need to consider if you are wise to be buying a house at all.

It's not pushing us to our financial limits Yes things will be a bit tight like most households these days, but we have thought this through and planned very carefully, we have a detailed monthly budget, and a savings account with a fair amount saved up for repairs and suchlike I just didn't want to spend such a big chunk of our savings before we've even moved into the house, if there was any chance at all that the vendors would pay for it. Surely that's a good MSE thing to do? But thanks anyway!