Changing my offer for a house after it has been accepted

hazyjo

Avalanche123 said:

DiamondLil said:

Avalanche123 said:

Can you not go over the kerb?

If it’s around my part of the country you’d wake up in the morning to find the council had dropped bollards in front of your ‘driveway’.

Interesting.

What if a house was advertised as having space for cars but the kerb is only dropped to a single space?

You'd treat it like a tandem drive and remove any cars in front of the one you want if you couldn't just drive it straight off. Although unless it's a particularly short drive, you should be able to drive a couple of cars off with just one dropped section of kerb.

Nothing wrong with that. 

macman

You can do whatever you want with your offer until the day of exchange: revise up, down, or withdraw.

blue_max_3

In my area (built up town), they started to restrict dropped kerbs because it was adding to drainage issues as gardens were being dug up and concreted over. And some had too small an area.
However, as yours has already been done and seems a large area, I doubt you'd fall into either of those categories. And you could add the electric charging point to further support your application.
Do the neighbours have dropped kerbs?
If they do, I'd be asking whether they had ever applied and been refused. That should cover you.

leonj

There is a good chance there is not a possibility to have the kerb dropped at all, or a previous owner would have done it before now

FtbDreaming

If you need the kerb dropped then theres no point revising the offer you might as well walk away. You could reduce the price by £2000 for the kerb, own the house then not get permission to drop it. I would drive over the path ad hoc if necessary but not as a long term option going in and out several times a day/week. The car wouldn't be happy. 

greatcrested

If the dropped curb is a necessity to you, withdraw your offer politely and find a different property.

As said, the current owner is probably just driving over the curb and, again as someone said above, will continue to do so till told to stop. Now that you've alerted the council, they may take action to stop the current owner- he won't be best pleased with you!

AW618

setnof said:

Thanks for the replies.
It is really an issue as I would like to charge an electric car. The council is not responding to enquiries regarding dropping kerbs. I feel bad for not realising this previously to making the offer to the vendor as it is mentioned in the advert that the driveway is subject to permission for dropping the kerb. But, because there were cars parked in the driveway (illegally)  I did not even notice this important detail. I suppose I will review my offer and risk the house being sell before I have a reply from the council.

I wouldn't worry about him; that's his problem for consistently parking illegally.  The chances are, as said above, that if he could get permission, he would have it, and the reason this house looks good to you is because you are comparing the price with houses with official drives, not with houses with no off-road parking.  It should sell at the same price as the latter.

AnotherJoe

I thought of another "gotcha".

Unless the installation company misses this detail, you wont get the grant for installing a charge point.

NameUnavailable

I lived in a conversion flat which had garages for each flat at the end of the garden. There were driveways in front of each garage (most parked there) and it was only after I bought it that I realised there was only a dropped section of kerb in front of the end garage. Basically when the freeholder converted the building into flats they built additional garages in what was the garden but didn't get the kerb dropped. 

I looked into it back at the time and nobody else was interested in bothering (including the freeholders). I was going to pay just to have it extended across my garage and in hindsight wish I had done so, but in effect I was able to access my garage/drive from the dropped section.

The area became busier and we would often find people parked across the garages. It is perfectly legal to do so as there wasn't a dropped kerb BUT I also found out that it's perfectly legal to park over someones dropped kerb unless you're blocking them in. Blocking them out is fine apparently! Seems daft but that's the law.

So, you can just carry on driving over the kerb, nobody is likely to bother about it, but you might find some ...... parks across your 'drive' and there's nothing you can do about it.

Unless you can see an obvious reason why (near to a corner, some obstruction in the way etc) then it's unlikely that the council will refuse a request to drop the kerb. I expect the current owner just didn't bother, a bit like my old neighbours. Have you actually asked if they have ever applied for a dropped kerb?

Ulitmately though if it's a deal breaker, break the deal!

Slithery

Councils tend to do things like this if they get a complaint...



This isn't a one-off, it happens more often than you'd think.