The house we like to buy has been underpinned need some urgent advice please!

Smiley_Sibs

We are in a similar position and are in the process of buying an underpinned property. We weren't advised of the underpinning until after we'd made the offer and instructed solicitors. The vendors have all the paperwork and guarantees etc and these have also been logged with the council. We are paying for a full structural survey to be done and will wait for the results of this before deciding what to do, eg. walk away, reduce price or proceed as we were. The underpinning doesn't concern me; what does concern me is the tree that caused the subsidence (its roots) is still there in the neighbours garden. Apparently it wasn't deemed necessary to remove it at the time. Since the work was carried out a TPO was placed on the tree.

I work for the building society that is providing our mortgage so I've been lucky to have some good advice.

This is our dream house so I'm just crossing everything that the survey comes back ok. The hardest thing about it all is that I know the vendors personally; they are friends of my family.

In your case, unless they can provide the paperwork or pay for/go halves on a structural survey I'd walk away. It's unlikely that anybody else will buy their house without both of these things. You've been more than reasonable I think. As for insurance the current insurers are obliged to keep insuring it.

Good luck!

cycloneuk

I have also found myself in this situation, i found out the property i had offered on had been underpinned when it came up on one of the searches. I reduced my offer to take into account the higher insurance premium and future resale problems. I have had a structural engineers report done last week and that shows no further movement and the original movement was historic according to the documents available.