Attempting to gauge value of dilapidated property.....

phoebe1989seb

We have a very dilapidated house in our village - the thatched roof has caved in and has a whopping great hole where rain apparently runs straight into a bath in the room below :eek:

Ever since we bought our house last year this property has been empty and whilst I understand it has previously been tenanted, there has been no signs of either tenants or owner in the last year. The house is neither for sale or rent although it appears to have a few sticks of furniture in the downstairs rooms which are visible from the front windows.

DH and I are interested in purchasing this property but are not sure how to go about it.

It would be a cash purchase.

Having done some research I have established who owns the house - the owner is a landlord of other local properties, has a very bad reputation and doesn't live in the area.

I have also discovered the house was purchased 10 years ago for £60k. Since then apart from a lick of magnolia emulsion it would seem nothing has been done to improve the condition of the house.....indeed it has deteriorated significantly in that time.

Locally there are no similar houses that have sold recently - the others (ours included) have either been much larger or much smaller but in far better condition. Whilst ours was a renovation project, it is about four times as big and had already been re-thatched so it is difficult to gauge how much this house other is worth. A house of less than half the square footage but that had been completely renovated sold two years ago for £110k, but that wasn't thatched.

Not that I trust Zoopla, but it gives a current valuation in the £90ks which seems very unlikely given the state of repair.......

Really, although I very much understand that this is a 'how long is a piece of string' question I just wondered how I should go about trying to establish what a reasonable price to pay would be and any advice would be hugely appreciated, thank you

martinsurrey

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/HomeAndCommunity/WhereYouLive/Derelictbuildingsandsquatters/DG_10030253

report it to the council and pester them to get involved with an empty dwelling property order.

it will either spur the landlord into fixing it, or selling it, either way, thier involvement will make things happen.

As to value, without a lot more info (I havent got a clue about thatch costs) I cant help.

AFK_Matrix

I have no experiance in this type of thing at all, but could you not bring a builder round and maybe do a bit of snooping with them and get an idea of what it's going to cost to get the place upto spec? And then maybe take the zoopla price and take the rebuild cost off it?

Or if you have done similar to your property and its roughly twice the size then what was the original price you bought at then halve that and see where that gets you?

Sorry if you have already thought of these things.

phoebe1989seb

Thanks guys - I did already have a look at that link and know for a fact that a couple of neighbours have mentioned reporting it to the council although I'm not sure if they have as yet.

Our house had already been re-thatched (one of the few renovations that had been carried out before we took it on) but know that it cost in excess of £40k in 2008 and that is without fire-proofing which was another £10k. The roof on the house in question covers a much smaller area......a third?

I would imagine the interior is pretty much in need of gutting (particularly upstairs) mainly as a result of the water coming through the roof and kitchen and bathroom have not been touched since the current owner bought in 2002 according to the neighbours.

We've estimated it would cost around £40-50k to do a basic renovation to bring it up to a decent standard without going overboard on high end fittings as we would do most of the work ourselves and have reliable trades to do the parts we can't tackle.

DH and I think we're unlikely to get it for a price in the region of what was paid 10 years ago, although I can't imagine it actually being worth more in its current condition.

I'll have to do more research into how prices have fluctuated in the area over the last ten years.......

martinsurrey

if you can get 4-5 people to complain every week with a letter or call to the poor housing control officer, he'll get things moving, he'd rather having one angry owner than 5 angry (BUT civil!) locals!

If the house has no (working) roof, it’ll not be mortgage-able, so will be cash buyers only and possibly an auction job. So you’ll be in a good position to get it, and you’ll pay a good rate (as you can’t outbid the market by much).

sounds like an exciting prospect, I wish I had something like this!

Fire_Fox

Is this a listed property? If so the renovation costs may be extortionate, you will need listed building consent which can be incredibly detailed, you may need to use specific materials or traditional techniques, you generally cannot just do a basic DIY renovation. Since your home is thatched are you already known to the conservation officer at the local council? If so you might have an informal chat about getting the owner to sell, maybe about value of the property and how sympathetic they would be to you DIYing, what materials are acceptable.

phoebe1989seb

Fire_Fox wrote: »

Is this a listed property? If so the renovation costs may be extortionate, you will need listed building consent which can be incredibly detailed, you may need to use specific materials or traditional techniques, you generally cannot just do a basic DIY renovation. Since your home is thatched are you already known to the conservation officer at the local council? If so you might have an informal chat about getting the owner to sell, maybe about value of the property and how sympathetic they would be to you DIYing, what materials are acceptable.

Fire Fox, thanks for your comments but no, the house is not listed and neither is ours for that matter. That said, we are experienced in renovating period properties very sympathetically having in the past taken on a large Victorian house that had previously been divided into four flats with no thought for the features that were destroyed in the process. We successfully restored it to its former glory as a family home and reinstated such features as a grand sweeping staircase and gothic style conservatory which was based upon the original - there only being three houses in the road designed by the same architect we were able to gain an insight into how the house originally looked by studying one of those which had not suffered as ours had.

Our last house was a Tudor house that had actually been dismantled in the 1930s, removed to a new site and rebuilt with Arts & Crafts additions (again amazingly not listed!) which had been treated to a disgusting 1980s makeover. Indeed, most peope in the area were completely unaware of the house's history, believing it to be a 1930s house in its entirety. Once again we sympathetically 'renovated' it (I hate that term ) and restored much of the character that had been hidden/ripped apart by the previous owners. This wasn't done as a money-making exercise but as a labour of love. In fact having downsized from our larger house we intended to stay there some years but soon realised that the area (in Essex) was not for us. Despite knowing we would be moving sooner rather than later, we lavished effort and expenditure on the house as we felt deeply sorry it had been allowed to fall into such disrepair. When we sold last year we lost in excess of £60k but felt it was worth it to have made the house whole again.......our friends say we 'save' houses but do think us more than a little eccentric, lol!

However, regardless of the lack of listing on any house we've owned, we prefer to use traditional methods where possible/practical and the architect we have used on our current project has many years of experience in dealing with period properties and their idiosyncrasies, advising where necessary how to sympathetically reinvent a period house to make it suitable for today's lifestyle without tearing it apart. We did consult one architect about our own house who wanted us to knock every internal wall down in order to make the whole house open-plan. He couldn't understand that we prefer to respect the original layout where possible

Fire_Fox

Tudor with Arts and Crafts?? **swoons**

phoebe1989seb

Fire_Fox wrote: »

Tudor with Arts and Crafts?? **swoons**

Mmmmm.......it was a gorgeous house, but the area was pants, which was a terrible shame