Buying Property with Loft Conversion & No Planning

hanjaygra

We are in the process of buying a 4 bed house with loft conversion. We were notified that the loft conversion didn't receive planning permission and was done circa. 20 year ago. In addition, a downstairs wall was removed approximately 4 years ago (prior to current owners) also without planning permission and with no buildings regulations certification. There is an indemnity policy in place and a note from the council stating that they won't pursue enforcement on the basis that buildings regulations are not contravened. Our Buildings Survey has shown that the main staircase height is now below building regs, following the erection of additional staircase to the loft room. Our surveyor is frustratingly not providing much feedback beyond both loft and downstairs wall removal appear structurally sound, on the surface. We plan to alter the loft conversion by putting a dormer in to create a larger room. So the questions that we have are:
1. Is the contravention of building regs on the stairway likely going to cause issues if applying for permission for dormer? What might the associated costs be?
2. Should we be concerned that permission/regs were not sought for downstairs wall removal? Could this imply shoddy workmanship, or is it relatively common?
3. Can the property be sold/valued as a 4 bed if the loft conversion doesn't comply to building regs? Should the house be valued as a 3? Are we likely to experience issues with our buildings insurance as a result?
4. Are we likely to have extreme difficulties when it comes to our selling the property?
Presumably there are a huge number of properties that have similar issues, particularly in a built up city such as London, so how worried should we be? Should we avoid like the plague, or are all of these surmountable and common problems?
Thanks in advance!

Fed

You're in a similar situation to where I was a couple of months back. My view from what i've read

1) No idea but fire safety and access is a factor when it comes to loft conversions so this could well be an issue that needs rectifying

2) It's a risk. I assume it's a load bearing wall? I've just completed on a property with a load bearing wall removed, no building regs but there's an RSJ, it was done 10+ years ago with no signs of structural problems so i'm willing to take the risk. You have a few options.

- Ask the vendor to get it signed off (next to no chance).
- Take it as it is and live in it with the risk.
- Assuming there's an RSJ remove a small section of the plaster and get a surveyor out to assess whether they think the work is suitable. If they are then that might put your mind at peace, if they're not then you'll want to rectify it and probably take the next option
- Apply for building regs and accept that it might cost you a few k in works to rectify and get it signed off.
You could try and negotiate a discount on the price so you can address this but unless the current vendors did so themselves when they purchased it they probably wont be very receptive to this

3) It should be sold and valued as a 3 bed imo. If you're planning to add a dormer yourselves the fact that someone has done an informal conversion isn't going to make it much cheaper than doing a loft conversion from scratch. We paid a price in line with other 2 beds on the road even though the loft is an informal conversion. Are you getting a mortgage? Does the lender know?

4) As it is, it would put some people off. If you're tackling the loft conversion and all the costs that come with it then that solves that problem.

Doozergirl

Firstly, knock throughs and loft conversions almost always fall under Permitted Development and so no planning permission is necessary.

As far as Building Control is concerned:

1) If the council have no intention of enforcing what is there, then they will not take issue with your potentially improving what is there. Very, very crudely put, the main rule with renovation works on existing houses is not to make anything worse than it was. If your new work is good and complaint, they will be happy. In 20 years of renovating, we have never been pulled up on historic works in a house.

If they ever did pull you up it would be out of genuine concern about safety.

Your role is to have a decent survey and be satisfied that the works carried out are structurally safe. The certificate would clearly help that but a lack of certificate does not mean that it isn!!!8217;t safe. Perhaps the only contravention when works were carried out was that lacking head height downstairs. We don!!!8217;t know. The best question for a surveyor is !!!8216;would you be put off buying it!!!8217; - should get you an honest opinion.

2) has been covered by Fed quite adequately in the post above.

3) I!!!8217;m not sure why Fed thinks it is an !!!8216;informal!!!8217; loft conversion that needs everything spending on it to make it !!!8216;formal!!!8217;.

As I!!!8217;ve mentioned, certificates and structural integrity are not mutually exclusive. You can have an acceptable conversion that a building inspector never laid eyes on. Not sure why people do it that way, but they do to save money.

Loft conversions that are decade old and have sign off can be worse than new ones without, simply because standards have changed significantly over the years. Some conversions will pre-date regulation and escape scrutiny altogether - as do most houses in this country.

If your house was built more than 20 years, I suspect there hasn!!!8217;t been a mentioned of a building regs certificate for the original house - yet it is still a house. Ditto with extensions, the could be old, low quality or more recent with no sign off yet you!!!8217;ll never see people on this board saying !!!8220;it!!!8217;s not an extension!!!8221;.

Houses with structurally integral conversions do still contain the same number of bedrooms and it is a bit of a myth that no certificate means no bedroom, but of course quality plays a part in that. A loft conversion is a major building project and crudely boarding out one!!!8217;s existing loft does not make a conversion. Again, refer to your surveyor.

We don!!!8217;t know how far the conversion has gone - it could be that is was perfect but for that bit of missing head height on the stairs which means it would never qualify for a certificate but it doesn!!!8217;t really undermine how you!!!8217;d live in it.

4) if you do put that dormer in, it will probably make the whole issue go away. You!!!8217;ll have a certificate, which if cleverly worded will say !!!8216;dormer to loft conversion!!!8217; which wffectively accepts that the loft conversion is a thing.

It is all down to structral integrity.

Doozergirl

Interesting thing happening with my punctuation there! Is it just me?

SuperMoose

Doozergirl wrote: »

Interesting thing happening with my punctuation there! Is it just me?

No - I can see it too :think:

steve55

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post links on here, but a company called Omega Build were very helpful when I needed some building advice.

Doozergirl

No steve, you!!!8217;re not allowed to post links because you don!!!8217;t have enough posts and you haven!!!8217;t established you!!!8217;re not spamming.

To my eye, it looks like you are so I!!!8217;d remove your post before it gets reported too many times. No one needs a builder, they need their own surveyor.

Bizarrely, that name only leads me to polycarbonatw roofs for conservatories so if it isn!!!8217;t spam, it certainly isn!!!8217;t helping.

Doozergirl

I’ve been broken!

:eek:

StumpyPumpy

8217; is the ascii-HTML code for an apostrophe or close quote (') 8216 is an open quote (`) Don't know if it is due to the current MSE weirdness or whether you cut and pasted your reply from elsewhere, however, if you copy you text into something that can do a global search and replace (MS Word, Wordpad, later versions of Notepad, etc) then replace all !!!8217; with ' and replace all !!!8216 with ` then paste it all back in, it should fix it for you.


SP

Doozergirl

Interesting. I did not copy and paste from elsewhere and am not in the position to global replace from my phone

I will try not to use any interesting punctuation.

StumpyPumpy

Don't know about how your phone does it - I'm PC only - smart phones are too clever for me.:p

It might be worth checking you haven't switched editor modes - the icon that looks like this: in the reply box (if that is even a thing on a phone). Otherwise - can't help you

SP