Finally moving house - new home undervalued by £15k! Advice/experience sought

PottyHouse_2

Cannon_Fodder wrote: »

Have you tried showing the survey to the vendor and asking them to consider re-negotiating?

They might have gone through the same process at their level of the chain, and got a response from above that allows them some leeway...

Think that will be our next step. They are not onward buying so top of the chain - all their money is going towards paying debts and they are in negative equity - nightmare - so probably no go there!

Thanks

Milliewilly

PottyHouse wrote: »

Wrong or error of judgement ??
I don't think I mentioned conspiracy, you're making me paranoid - or is that you??

I would say most people who have had their house on the market for a year or so would know the local market and house prices. We are not paid an enormous amount of money to do that as job.

I have always said a house is only worth what someone is prepared to pay but if we went to a seller £20k under their "reasonable" asking price they would tell us to p**s off and would not take us seriously. Yet a Surveyor/Valuer can do it and it's considered their expert knowledge !!?

Surveyors are human like everyone else but now I have an opinion of them that they are up their own a""e. They are there to protect the banks and us normal people are paying the price - we only want to move house, don't think we are being unreasonable !!

GDB2222 is clearly connected to RICS in some way.

bmunky7

Share your pain, we had a valuation on a property come back £10k below our offer price, although it now appears the valuer was probably right so did us a favour. Having a survey / valuation done tomorrow on another house so fingers crossed our offer and the surveyor's opinion are in line!

Good luck to the others with the valuations!

GDB2222

PottyHouse wrote: »

Surveyors are human like everyone else but now I have an opinion of them that they are up their own a""e. They are there to protect the banks and us normal people are paying the price - we only want to move house, don't think we are being unreasonable !!

Absolutely correct. They are there to protect the banks. You can/should get a survey done for your own benefit, but clearly the mortgage valuation is done for the lenders. Their criterion is for a fairly-forced-sale valuation, along the lines of what they could get if it was marketed for only a few weeks.

By the way, I agree that valuers are human, and a variation of 10% between valuers is pretty normal. That probably covers the £15k you were complaining about.

I'm curious about how you know what all the local prices are? You are looking at actual sold prices from nethouseprices or the like? How do you know what condition these houses are like inside?

cardsharps

What's the point in paying a surveyor to value a property if you're going to ignore their findings? And why do you want to pay more for a property than what it is actually worth?

now that really is mad,.

GDB2222

Milliewilly wrote: »

GDB2222 is clearly connected to RICS in some way.

You're stalking me.

No, I'm not a surveyor or connected to RICS.

Gorgeestwo

cardsharps wrote: »

What's the point in paying a surveyor to value a property if you're going to ignore their findings? And why do you want to pay more for a property than what it is actually worth?

now that really is mad,.

In our situation we paid what the property is worth to US, we had quite specific criteria and the house fitted those, the valuation was for mortgage purposes and we were in a position to be able to find the extra couple of thousand to be able to get the house we wanted. Just as some people will go out and spend a couple of thousand £ on an all singing all dancing tv, now that is mad imo. Our couple of thousand £ went on the extra we needed to buy this house. Buying this house is a long term move for us, ultimately house prices will go up again, who knows when and even if they don't in 20 odd yrs time we will own our own property that we've enjoyed living in.

We certainly weren't going to walk away from a property that suited us, when we were pretty limited in the first place because the suveyor valued it less than other properties that had sold in the area, that were alot smaller than it, who knows maybe he was having a bad day, he didn't come from this area at all, maybe the bank were trying to get us onto a higher interest rate but they aren't perfect and aren't right all the time, nobody is, as far as we are concerned its money well spent, that doesn't make us mad, it just means that to Abbey the house is only worth £136k but to us it is worth more as its our home and will hopefully be a long term one.

seraphina

Why are you getting so excited about paying *more* for something?

I would have gone straight back to the seller, told him what the bank had valued the house at and pointed out that it was unlikely that any other prospective valuer would come up with a radically different valuation.

I still don't understand why people want to pay more for houses.

1echidna

Just to put this scenario in perspective from a sellers point of view. We had a valuation from our buyers bank's surveyor of 15k less than the price we had agreed. Our EA was shocked and immediately gathered evidence of recent actual sale prices of similar houses nearby. Our buyers line was that his bank would not lend him more and he would not want to pay more than the house was worth anyway. We were thinking should we ditch this buyer and try for another willing to pay more. There was of course the risk that a buyer also seeking a mortgage from one of the arms of the giant Lloyds banking group would come along, the same firm of surveyors would be used, and that they would not vary their valuation. In the event our EA did manage to get the surveyor to up his valuation by 10k and we and our buyer agreed on this price. I think we may well have taken the risk and sought another buyer if the valuation had not been increased, albeit that it would have been a risky course of action.

Gorgeestwo

seraphina wrote: »

Why are you getting so excited about paying *more* for something?

I would have gone straight back to the seller, told him what the bank had valued the house at and pointed out that it was unlikely that any other prospective valuer would come up with a radically different valuation.

I still don't understand why people want to pay more for houses.

I don't understand why people go out and buy a brand new car or that tv but they do, those things are going to devalue straight away, its personal choice and if you can afford it then why not.

The seller was fully aware of how much it was valued at, but they wouldn't accept that and I don't blame them as there were other houses not as nice as this one that had sold recently for more, but like I've explained above we have found a house that is our home that fits our needs and trust me there aren't many of those around.
Its great if you maybe don't have many specific 'wants' in a house then maybe, yes walk away, but sometimes its not just that cut and dry.

I don't understand why people pay what they pay for lots of things, but ultimately its what something is worth to you, the buyer that matters and we were able to as buyers buy what we wanted.

And I'm not sure how you think I'm getting excited about it, if that was directed at me, but I'm excited to have found a house that we love and are happy in Nothing wrong with being happy.