Buying a flat in a house with wall tie plates

ddmanda

Hi, my partner and I are buying a flat in a house built ca 1910. Surveyor has got back to us stating that there are button wall tie plates for tie rods which confirm that there has been structural movement in the past. This has been flagged as a “serious/urgent” issue and he was implicitly suggesting against buying the property.
We will get a structural engineer to check the condition and would not buy the property if the structure were not sound. But we would like to have some opinion on the following matter before we progress further.
We don’t want any difficulties when selling the flat at some point in the future, would the existence of the wall ties put anyone off? We are concerned that potential buyers would get scared off by the wall ties holding the structure together even before we got the chance to explain that we have had a structural engineer inspected the house.

Please help and thanks in advance!

phill99

There are hundreds of thousands of buildings in the UK with tie rods. many go back hundreds of years and were often put in shortly after the property was built.


I think your surveyor is covering his back side.

davidmcn

May be counter-intuitive, but I suspect that a building which has had strengthening work carried out to it is probably a safer bet than one of a similar design which hasn't.

ddmanda

We did think that he was just being precautious but we also thought he wouldn’t have gone as far as hinting that we shouldn’t buy it if it wasn’t a genuine issue. Good to know that this is not uncommon, thanks!