Survey - ongoing structrual movement!

Yorkie1

OP, if you do decide to go forward with this property, you won't be able to rely on the survey you've been shown by the vendors, as they are the surveyor's client and you are not. You'll need to either get your own one, or to get the surveyor to cover you too so that if anything comes back in the future, you have someone to go back to professionally.

AAS

Thanks - yes I've just been told this by our surveyor... Annoying I didn't think of that!

ruggedtoast

AAS wrote: »

Nightmare isn't it! But I thought that a lot of old houses will have had settlement/old movement and this was normally ok with insurance companies/mortgage lenders as it is not recent? Am I wrong? My worry that it will be hard to sell but I was thinking that the if the cracks are due to the guttering issue we can fix those issues and repoint/plaster the cracks and then it would unlikely to be picked up in future and even if it was we have an engineers report - is this optimistic?

Longstanding movement is probably ok and surveyors usually won't list as a reason for concern.

Nevertheless you will have a hard time finding a high street insurance policy that will offer cover on a property that has had structural movement. Longstanding or no you're stuck with a few specialist insurers, things like this make houses less attractive and harder to sell, and therefore, cheaper.

Think hard about what you're paying before going ahead (subject to your own survey), and what will happen if you need to sell in a hurry.