something dodgys going on? declined on valuation-japanese knotweed

GMS

wannahouse wrote: »

BUT you're forgetting (or didn't read) that we have agreed will be doing some works on the house btwn exchange and completion,as required after the full survey, to make it satisfactory to the lender, and the mortgage adviser has just had another customer do the same, in order to get the finance, and in her case, it was 7 mths btwn exchange and completion.
once the works were done, the surveyor came back to check all was satisfactorily done, and then she got the mortgage offer...

!

Tread very carefully with this.

You are committing to buy by exchanging and without a mortgage offer for the full amount this is dangerous. You are risking your deposit.

Is the vendor not willing to carry out required works prior to exchange even if this means a renegotiated purchase price? Would make life easier all round and mean no risk to your money.

wannahouse

GMS wrote: »

Tread very carefully with this.

You are committing to buy by exchanging and without a mortgage offer for the full amount this is dangerous. You are risking your deposit.

Is the vendor not willing to carry out required works prior to exchange even if this means a renegotiated purchase price? Would make life easier all round and mean no risk to your money.

the vendor is a very old lady that has no money to do any works, hence the condition of the house now...
i had concerns about this, but the surveyor that is doing the full survey said he had some ideas that might be useful...

i would be prepared to risk the money doing the works BEFORE exchange, if we can have an agreement done whereby they can not sell it to anyone else, unless we cannot get the mortgage offer..


anyway, we've had the japanese knotweed survey done of the entire property, and it is as we thought- completely free of JN or anything that resembles it ..he will be sending through the report, and hopefully we can get the process moving again...
japanese knotweed my hat!
really makes you trust a surveyors professional opinion on everything else,when they can't tell their thistles from their knotweed!

cayennepepper

Glad to hear it wasn't Japanese knotweed! :j We are selling and this weed was found within a few meters of our boundary in an unadopted road. We are paying a lot of ££ for a specialist to eradicate it. Luckily it didn't deter our buyers. The bank would not lend to them because of it, but they will now that a specialist has been instructed. It was only a small clump. So much money for such a tiny clump. Oh well, we are doing the right thing.

dunstonh

really makes you trust a surveyors professional opinion on everything else,when they can't tell their thistles from their knotweed!

Late to thread and probably missed it but isnt the point that one was a valuer and the other a surveyor? You shouldnt expect the former to know things the latter would.

wannahouse

dunstonh wrote: »

Late to thread and probably missed it but isnt the point that one was a valuer and the other a surveyor? You shouldnt expect the former to know things the latter would.

the guy that did the valuation is a commercial surveyor ,Bsc(Hons) MRICS MCIH , so he should know his knotweed from his lavendar!

you would expect that he wouldn't say on his report with certainty that there is japanese knotweed present, if he wasn't sure, but he did.
if he thought it might be, but wasn't sure, it would have been prudent to recommend an expert be brought in to check before closing it down..

the mortgage adviser said the report HAD gone to underwriting, and they said that they would be willing to work with the damp and other issues that were listed , but unfortunately the japanese knotweed rules it out to lend on so they wouldn't be able to offer on that...

now that we have the survey done showing there is no knotweed on the property, lloyds will go back to the surveyor and ask him to remove this from his report and we can move forward with the next part!
theres more to it, but thats the basics...
he might actually be removed from the case and someone else put on it instead, as it is pretty unacceptable to make something up, or a sign of imcompetance if he was genuinely mistaken as there is NOTHING there that could be confused with knotweed in any of its states...

also GMS, after your advice, i questioned the adviser on how we exchange and then do work without a mortgage offer in place, as that would expose us to huge risk...
he said we absolutely WOULDN'T exchange without the mortgage offer in place...i forget what he called it, as i had noisy kids in the car during the conversation, lloyds don't do retentions but lloyds would give us a mortgage offer, conditional on getting xyz done, at which point they give us the money to complete.if we done fix xyz to their satisfaction, then no money- if we do the work and get it signed of ,then we're good to go...
so we exchange with a mortgage offer in place and the vendor is pretty cool with us taking the time it takes to do the work on it,which hopefully is not too long...

ah...all sorted...thankyou for the helpful suggestions i have been given...

wannahouse

cayennepepper wrote: »

Glad to hear it wasn't Japanese knotweed! :j We are selling and this weed was found within a few meters of our boundary in an unadopted road. We are paying a lot of ££ for a specialist to eradicate it. Luckily it didn't deter our buyers. The bank would not lend to them because of it, but they will now that a specialist has been instructed. It was only a small clump. So much money for such a tiny clump. Oh well, we are doing the right thing.

just make sure that you don't accidentally take a tiny piece of it with you on your shoes, and transfer the nightmare to the new place!!! lol!

glad you managed to get the sale moving on though...
the JN expert today said he LOOKS for houses with a problem to buy as you get a good discount, he said he's not scared of it at all, because it can be sorted...