Santander devalued property we are buying

IMF

Hi All,

Was hoping I could get some advice for an issue that I have with a property we are buying.

We agreed a price on a dream property with the seller several months ago and had to wait to sell our property first. We got an offer on our house which we accepted, got accepted within days for a mortgage subject to survey. Now after the survey, Santander are valuing the property at £40k less than our offer (we offered £635k, they say it's worth £595k).

I'm not sure how they got to this price as the next door property sold for £640k 4 months ago.

The neighbouring property was listed as "5 bedrooms" but it's actually a 4 bedroom house with the attached single garage converted to one of the bedrooms.

The property that I am buying is 4 bedrooms and doesn't have the garage conversion but it has a detached double garage instead of an attached single garage and the plot of land that the house sits on is double that of the neighbouring property.

One of the reasons I can think of why the value would be lower is that they went off the price that the house was previously sold for in 2006 and calculated the value now. The issue is, the house was purchased by the current owner from his own dad and all his dad asked for at the time was for his mortgage to be paid off so he got it for 30% less than it was worth.

Another reason could be that houses on that road have sold for less recently but those houses are 2/3rds the size of this house and sold for £540k so maybe they chose the wrong houses for comparison.

The seller is refusing to negotiate a new price as he already has an offer from someone else who has a mortgage agreed already and he was only delaying that for us as we went direct instead of through the agent saving him £££. (Our offer was accepted before he even had an agent and only got an agent recently as we took so long to get an offer on our house!).

Santander are happy to still give mortgage but we'll have to put in extra deposit which we can do but we wanted to save that money for an extension we have planned. We are also worried that when we have to remortgage in 2 years, they'll devalue the property even further and leave us in a tight situation.

Any advice on how to proceed would be greatly appreciated!

Has anyone successfully managed to get Santander to change their valuation? If I could get it to at least £605k I would be happy!

Thanks!

kingstreet

It's not Santander's valuation, it's their selected chartered surveyor's. You might find this pedantic, but it is very difficult to get a surveyor to change their mind as they are likely to be knowledgeable about the local area and what is selling and or what.

To appeal you will need evidence of the recent (last four months) sold prices of similar property in the vicinity (within 0.5 miles). Typically, three such comparables will be required.

Santander may accept you paying for another valuation by another of its panel surveyors.

This is the kind of thing we handle for clients, so if you have a broker ask them to put this together for you.

IMF

Thanks, will ask them what other surveyors I can use.

The seller called me straight after the survey and told me that when he asked the surveyor what he thought, the response he got was "don't ask stupid questions".

kingstreet

The answer could have been more polite perhaps, but the surveyor has a contract with the lender and not with the vendor, nor with you.

As a result they shouldn't venture an opinion at all. Most will simply say everything is fine and reach their conclusions later when they study the comparables.