Can anyone settle a debate re: loft conversion and selling home?

adam_ironside

Hi
We have just had a loft conversion done - excellent job and all to regulations (steal beams, fire doors etc.... we even had to have a partition wall that we took down put back up so that building control would sign the work off). In order to conform with building control the job was a little more expensive, but we felt this would result in a safer job, and would make our house easier to sell in the future as we have all the paperwork from the local authority.

My next door neighbour (who i get on very well with) moved into his house and his loft was already converted - although I know it is not up to scratch with regard to the regulations (wooden rather than steal beams, staircase too narrow, no fire doors in house etc...). He likes our conversion but likes to say (in a nice way) that we wasted money on certain things like the fire doors, putting walls back up etc... (although building control would not have signed the project off without them)

My query is this:

Because we have done our house 'by the book' we will not have a problem when it comes to selling the house with regards to solicitors queries. But, will my neighbour have a problem? His conversion was largely complete when he moved in.
Is it a problem when selling a house if you do not have any paperwork? or if the existing alterations are not conforming to regulations?

In theory, could we have done away with jumping through some of the hoops we had to jump through - and when it comes to selling, just say "the house was like this when we moved in".
Cheers

aa4466

When you sell your house then, if the buyer's solicitor is any good, he will be asking you to show that any work that you had done was done to the regulations. I fell foul of this a few years ago when a builder put some new double glazed windows in for me. I had never heard of FENSA but when we sold the place we were asked to provide either the FENSA certificate or building control sign off. In the end we knocked an amount off the sale price equivalent to the cost of an insurance policy to cover the buyer against any future comeback. It was a few years ago and it was only about fifty quid, I think.

Could you say it was like that when you moved in? Yes, but you have to sign the legal document saying so.

Doozergirl

It depends on the buyer. You will not have any trouble at all, your neighbour will more than likely be okay going on the age of the conversion but som ebuyers can be a bit jumpy.

Advice to a buyer of your neighbours house would be to sure that a surveyor is happy and then have your neighbour purchase an indemnity policy against enforcement from Building Control. In all likelihood, building control will never seek enforcement (they can't do it without a court order if the work is over 12 months old and they simply don't have the resource to chase after old loft conversions unless they are unsafe).

What you have is piece of mind that you have the relevant fire breaks and escape route should the worst happen. That's worth it alone in my eyes. You never know what will happen, that is your insurance policy.

LlamaKarma

I imagine it will all come up in any survey - surveyor will advise that conversion is not compliant with building regs. I know we were advised of that when considering buying a house

loft_conversion_expert

The first matter to settle is that are you sure the neighbours loft conversion is actually legal.
Wooden beams and a narrow staircase does not mean it is not to current building regulations. This is because beams can be wooden or steel and staircase can be 550mm wide and still conform to current regulations.
Also, and does your neighbour have a "Building regulation certificate"
Fire doors are not always neccesary as the current doors can be treated to make them fire compliant.
So the answer is not simple.
Information provided by technical office of Touchstone Lofts.

iamcornholio

The council has six months to take enforcement action and 12 months to detect and ask for a retrospective application for work which should have required building regulation approval (controlled work), but was done without it.

After this time, the work has to be structurally dangerous or a significant life safety hazard before they will take enforcement action.

So all those people who want to sell a property which has had controlled work which has not had an application and gets highlighted, are merely caught in an ar'se covering exercise by the Solicitor or surveyor.

If work has been done properly, albeit without going through building regulations, and the property remains structurally sound and in satisfactory condition, then there is no reason why the property should not be purchased, and no reason why a retrospection buillding regulation application should be made, and absolutely no reason why the buyer/seller should be coerced to purchase the worthless indemnity insurance

It tends to become a bargaining point for the purchaser to try and knock some money off for their 'risk', but the seller can just say "do one, take it or leave it"

The best thing to do in this situation is to have the whole property or just the relevent work surveyed. Then the only relevent question to ask the surveyor is "Does this work have a detrimental impact on the structure, or the property in general?" If not, then there is no reason why the buyer needs a bit of paper from building control