Party Wall matter

kaych

Hi all, I have a question regard to party wall matters.

Basically, we want to build an extension to the rear. There are two neighbours who we will need to serve the party wall notice. One of them has agreed to sign. The other house is owned by a limited company and it is currently rented out. We sent them a letter using the address on the title registry. They have now appointed their own surveyor.

My question is, we haven't appointed a surveyor ourselves yet, as we wanted to discuss our plans with them first. but now they have appointed one, can we actually also use their surveyor to keep the cost down as we haven't appointed ours yet - so their surveyor will become the Agreed Surveyor or it doesn't work this way?

Many thanks in advance for any advice and comments

Doozergirl

They have the choice of whether to use yours or their own.

If they've picked their own then it's likely that they're either particularly attached to this one or they definitely want their own separate one. You can always ask if they're happy if you use them too. You never know.

kaych

Thank you Doozegirl. I will ask their surveyor as the owner has appointed their surveyor to deal with everything on their behalf.

I just wasn't sure whether that's the 'normal' practice and if we were allowed to use the neighbour's surveyor or we have to have two separate ones.

Thank you!

teneighty

kaych wrote: »

Hi all, I have a question regard to party wall matters.

Basically, we want to build an extension to the rear. There are two neighbours who we will need to serve the party wall notice. One of them has agreed to sign. The other house is owned by a limited company and it is currently rented out. We sent them a letter using the address on the title registry. They have now appointed their own surveyor.

My question is, we haven't appointed a surveyor ourselves yet, as we wanted to discuss our plans with them first. but now they have appointed one, can we actually also use their surveyor to keep the cost down as we haven't appointed ours yet - so their surveyor will become the Agreed Surveyor or it doesn't work this way?

Many thanks in advance for any advice and comments

Have you actually served notice or did you just write to them to make contact?

If you haven't served a formal notice I would go back and check very carefully that your work does fall under the Party Wall Act as this could potentially cost you a lot of money in surveyors fees.

Before you appoint this surveyor get a fee quote, I found a chap recently who charges £300/hour whilst some only charge £50/hour. Depending on the other surveyor's fee it might be cheaper to appoint your own as the Building Owner's Surveyor does the bulk of the work.

kaych

Hi Teneighty. We do need to serve them notice as we are attached to their house (semi-detached) and will be building up against the wall sharing with them.

I wrote to them saying that I knew we needed to serve them a notice but wished to discuss it with them and asked them to contact us. The next thing we knew, a surveyor contacted us on behalf of the company. Since we haven't got a surveyor ourselves yet, we asked the surveyor if he could act as our agreed surveyor. He gave us a fee and I think we just saved £1000 there for not having to have a surveyor for us and one for the neighbour.

It actually worked out quite well. The neighbour got the surveyor they chose and we can use the same surveyor too without the additional cost. Happy ending for us