Mortgage offer with retention

thomas_chase · 22 November 2016 at 11:19AM

Hi all,

I recently made an offer on a property at £126k, around £20k under my maximum budget. The Homebuyer's survey was completed, and the surveyor made a very non-committal remark that he had detected a slightly raised damp level on one wall (the back wall of the living room, which now has a conservatory against it on the other side) and requires a damp and timber check (Nationwide considers this as evidence of rising damp) and that a nearby tree should also be checked. He recommended a value of £124k to account for £2k of possible repairs.

Nationwide have responded by telling me that my current mortgage product is no longer valid (borrowing £113,400, 90% LTV), and have offered a mortgage of £124k with a £2k retention with a much higher (1% more) interest rate. The rest of the email simply says that they want me to tell them what to do next, but offers no suggested actions other than a link to their current mortgage products.

The only option I can see is to get the surveys needed and submit those to Nationwide, confirming that they will accept these beforehand of course (they have not said this in their email). Do I have any other options? I can afford the missing £2k (I did want to spend this on new furniture, but I can get by with what I have), but I don't think this solves the issue. Renegotiation with the seller may be possible, but again, the repairs will still need to be done as far as Nationwide is concerned.

As a final thought, I'm pretty sure that the rising damp issue is nonsense - there is no visible evidence of this, and the current occupier has quite a lot of furniture (which we looked behind, the surveyor did not). Equally, it is also technically now an internal wall, so I'm pretty sure this is probably condensation if anything. The tree is more likely to be a valid issue, I would imagine.

Thanks for any and all advice! I realise that this question has been asked before, but one thing that I can't find an explanation for is the raised interest rate - does anyone know why this might be?