Home Buyer Survey valuation lower than offer

clelba

My partner and I are first time buyers and made an offer £3000 below the asking price on a 1920s semi-detached house. The market in the area has been going a bit crazy, with several houses we looked at going for well above the asking price. We had a Home Buyer survey done which showed up a lot of level 2 issues - including damp, and a car port/garage that's basically useless (door doesn't open). Most importantly the surveyor valued the house £12000 less than what we offered, and advised renegotiation. Given it's a seller's market at the moment, how should we go about trying to renegotiate the price? Go straight to the valuation price? Or lower, or higher? I've put a request out for quotes on the damp work which should give us some extra ammunition.

The only other threads on this topic I've found are from when the market was a bit more in favour of the buyer...

fashionvictim

How can you get quotes without access to the property - is it empty?

I would ask the sellers to drop the price to valuation price. Anyone apart from a cash buyer will probably have the same issue.

Will the price reduction give you have the money to do the potential work?

If you pay over the valuation that is costing you cash and stamp duty etc, and you still have the hassle of getting the work done.

clelba

Thanks for the advice - we're going to go to the estate agent and say we need to renegotiate...if they won't reduce it at all then we'll have to pull out, but if they're willing to come down part of the way, I guess that's a decision we'll have to make based on how much work we're going to have to do.

As for getting quotes, I imagine they would have to get access via the estate agents, as the surveyor did.

davidmcn

What's the £12k as a percentage of your offer?

And I hope you looked inside the garage...

clelba

It's just under 7% of our original offer. We did look inside the "garage" but from the rear pedestrian door which was fine - we (naively, I suppose) didn't try the up-and-over garage door which is the one that the surveyor couldn't open.

The current owner only bought the house a year and a half ago, for less than the surveyor's valuation, and although the market has gone up, I'm not sure it's gone up all that much!

Dan-Dan

Why would you pay more than its worth ?
And advise your reoffer through your solicitor , not the estate agent

clelba

The solicitor is the first person I went to, and she advised going through the estate agent!

And everything in the city seems to be going for more than it's worth at the moment...

pinkteapot

Renegotiate through the agent, not your solicitor. It'll be a lot quicker!

AdrianC

clelba wrote: »

how should we go about trying to renegotiate the price?

Hand the EA and vendor a copy of the survey, and say "Look - the surveyor says -£12k, what we going to do about it?".

If they say "Well, OK" - you're laughing.
Any other reply - anywhere from "Nope, not happening" to "Oooh, split it 50/50", you need to decide whether to walk away or not.

That simple.

FWIW, a new up-and-over garage door isn't THAT big a job, and you may well find that it's relatively cheap and simple to get it fixed. A lot of garage door specialists do surprisingly reasonable "services" - last one I had done, a few years back, was ~£100. If there's major parts needed, they'll be extra, but they'll include small stuff in that usually.

Dan-Dan

pinkteapot wrote: »

Renegotiate through the agent, not your solicitor. It'll be a lot quicker!

If you are in anyway easily persuaded or intimidated then keeping it through solicitors is the best way in my view

Also , in any event , the solicitor is going to need to know the new selling price at some point

Dird

The whole country isn't a sellers market...is the area popular? Is there not other houses in the £170-190k range in the area you like?

Personally I would pull out unless they match the valuation as it's had 2 issues flagged up (most likely thousands in repair bills) and you need to overpay by £12k on top of that.

If you're willing to make up that £15k or so isn't there a much nicer house in the area valued £10-15k more?