Too many problems - pulled out!

jamief

Well, I posted last week about some of the problems we were having trying to buy our first home. Had an offer accepted on a nice 3 bedroom flat with an attic conversion, but turned out that

1) No planning permission or building regs or anything for the attic conversion
2) No idea who actually owned the attic space (going by deeds it was still shared under common law by all tennants!)
3) Current owner had extended his garden onto land owned by power company
4) substation right beside flat
5) Fusebox nailed shut (weird one)
6) Timber work had been done, but no paperwork / guarantees or anything

It got to the point where we just knew we couldn't get everything resolved, so we pulled out. I just hope whoever puts an offer in next has a good lawyer who will spot all the things wrong with this place! Anyway, its back to looking as houses this week for us

worriedfirsttimebuyer

Sounds like you did the right thing - loft conversions are dodgy things to get around, but to me, the power station thingy sounded the most worrying thing!

lewolf

jamief wrote:

Well, I posted last week about some of the problems we were having trying to buy our first home. Had an offer accepted on a nice 3 bedroom flat with an attic conversion, but turned out that

1) No planning permission or building regs or anything for the attic conversion
2) No idea who actually owned the attic space (going by deeds it was still shared under common law by all tennants!)
3) Current owner had extended his garden onto land owned by power company
4) substation right beside flat
5) Fusebox nailed shut (weird one)
6) Timber work had been done, but no paperwork / guarantees or anything

It got to the point where we just knew we couldn't get everything resolved, so we pulled out. I just hope whoever puts an offer in next has a good lawyer who will spot all the things wrong with this place! Anyway, its back to looking as houses this week for us

Sorry to hear this - years ago we tried to buy a house and discovered that the front of tha house was not owned by the vendors. Basically you couldn't walk up the path to your own front door without crossing someone else's land. This meant that the land owner could come along at any time and charge you for getting to your front door.

Hope you have better luck next time.

bs0u0128

i pulled out of one last week at exchange point, because it turned out the sloping floor the surveyor found was actually a manhole with the only access point to a shared drain, plus no certificates either for work done, plus a whole host of other things, thankfully now looks like we can get tons more for our money and am really glad we have good solicitors to find all the issues out

goldbyron

Sounds like you did the right thing. Poor old vendors - it will be difficult to sell their flat I would have thought. They probably had awful solicitors initially and now they are lumbered.

jamief

Re: their awful solicitors - When our solicitor sent them a letter last week raising the issues (on tuesday), we had a picture of their solicitor hiding away in his office! We didn't get any reply by Friday, and decided over the weekend to pull out; Im sure they will be gutted about losing the sale (as we are), but you can't take any risks when such huge sums of money are involved. Got a couple of places to look at tonight, so fingers crossed we find something soon!

I think the moral is - however much you don't want to pull out - if you aren't 100% sure that everything is okay, then you have to... its not worth the risk imo!