Can we appeal a survey for a mortgage?

Perrywood

Hi

We have had a survey on the house we want to purchase and had believed that everything should be fine. The surveyor came back with issues and has said that he is unlikely to agree the valuation to the bank. You might think, "oh well, that's life" and we might have thought the surveyor was doing us a favour if it wasn't for the fact that we know the house was surveyed for different buyers only two months ago. Not only that, for the same bank and that a full mortgage offer offered due to there being no major findings in the exact same survey!

There has been a suggestion that we have been unlucky with this surveyor as if we had had the surveyor from two months ago, we wouldn't have a problem. Do lenders ever consider anything like this or would we have grounds to appeal and ask for another survey based upon the fact that the lender was happy to lend the money in March? Nothing has happened to the property at all in the two months so it seems crazy we are going to miss out on what could be an amazing purchase because of one man's view.

Thanks for any advice!

cattie

Unfortunately valuing property is not an exact science & different surveyors can well come up with different prices. Sometimes it's because one can be more familiar with an area than a different surveyor & sometimes it often seems that certain surveyors give lower valuations than that offered at.

Also, there have been changes in mortgages over just the past couple of weeks with lenders tightening up on how much they are willing to lend & to whom they will lend. Many people who qualified for a mortgage before the MMR came into force are finding that they no longer qualify or that they can't borrow as much as originally thought.

It is extremely unlikely that a lender will listen to any appeal. But wait & see what happens when the valuation comes back. It may not be much less than what you've offered at & you might then be able to renegotiate with the vendor.

The only other option I can think of is to try another lender, which will of course mean another survey to pay for.

Perrywood

Thank you cattie so much for your reply. The frustration is that that we have passed all the new rules and been approved only last Friday under the new rules. And we also have a friend who is a developer that couldn't see why the surveyor had these issues. This surveyor said that he would recommend a full building survey if we were pursuing the purchase of the house but he didn't feel he could support the valuation. Do you know if we are able to ask the surveyor what he would value it as or do we need to wait for the lender? If they agree to a building survey, could that surveyor disagree with the valuation from today's surveyor and everything could go through?

It just seems wrong that the with the same survey for the same lender, two months apart could be so different!

Thank you again.

Thrugelmir

What type of survey did you pay for?

Perrywood

Home buyers survey. The middle one of the three options. This was advised by financial advisor and had been the one that the previous buyers had had and it was fine. The house is old but there are no signs of any issues at all.

But he decided not to do the survey because he felt it needed a full survey and just did the valuation which is where we now have the issue. Our financial advisor spoke to him too and was not very hopeful after the conversation. His view was we have probably been unlucky with the surveyor we had which seems very unfair!

poppy123b

your situation sounds exactly the same as the problems we had with our survey.
to cut a long long story short, previous buyer using Natwest (same as us) for mortgage had mortgage survey done 1 month before us, survey was fine appart from a £5000 retention on the , floorsboards, buyer had to pull out due to house he was selling fell through, we had a survey done, which basically condemed the house ! mortgage turned down, the survey was filled with all sorts of silly reasons such as polystyrene ceiling tiles a fire hazard (we were removing these) lol ,

i was determed to get this house and argued and argued with Natwest, but got no where at all! in the end we said right we are going with someone else we used countrywide broker, explained exactly what happened to her and used Halifax for our mortgage the survey was done again different surveyor and came back 100% fine.

We now have the mortgage and house. (polystyrene ceiling tiles have been removed!) i hope you manage to get it sorted, dont give up, however stressful it seems now