Connells Survey & Valuation

Thrugelmir

juliedee4663 said:

We are selling our property and our buyers had a home buyer's report done by Connells. We now have to have a Japanese Knotweed survey undertaken, at our expense, because even though the surveyor stated that he could see no knotweed on our property or the surrounding land he gave it a "red 3". Our buyers are now understandably worried, and are threatening to pull out unless we spend £250+ on this survey. We will be putting in a formal complaint both through the company and taking it further to an ombudsman if necessary.

Perhaps the surveyor is aware of something you aren't. Unlikely they've expressed such a view without some foundation. 

MWT

It is possible you are close to other reports of Knotweed, have a look on this map and see if anything is close to you...

http://www.planttracker.org.uk/map/knotweed

[Deleted User]

juliedee4663 said:

We are selling our property and our buyers had a home buyer's report done by Connells. We now have to have a Japanese Knotweed survey undertaken, at our expense, because even though the surveyor stated that he could see no knotweed on our property or the surrounding land he gave it a "red 3". Our buyers are now understandably worried, and are threatening to pull out unless we spend £250+ on this survey. We will be putting in a formal complaint both through the company and taking it further to an ombudsman if necessary.

but you dont have a contract with the surveyors so on what grounds are you complaining? The buyers are paying for professional advice, if they think they have been given bad advice then thats up to them to deal with

It would be like a vendor complaining about me if their buyers mortgage got declined...it doesnt make any sense

Kim19701

We are selling our house and the buyers lender used Connells to do a homebuyers report. It was under valued and lost us the sale. He spent less than 10 minutes in our property and blamed covid for under valuing it. He even got the wrong number of bathrooms in the report and the description was wrong. Totally incompetent, don't use them! 

luke105

We had them value the house we were buying last year. We offered £223,000 and they valued it at £210,000.
we told the vendors we will not pay a penny more than the valuation and they gave in. 

We have now sold the same house stc for £255,000 and had it valued by the same company and same guy! He has agreed it’s worth £255,000. 45k in 10 months. 

Simply, simply lovely. Thanks Connells 

Noneforit999

Connells came out to value ours.

Offer was £380k and we were expecting down valuation to about £360k as buyer offered over the price anyway.

Came back at £370k and buyer is making up the £10k difference. 

PowerHandle

Connells are useless. Downvalued the property we are buying and caused a load of grief including incorrect information such as ‘evidence the front door has been moved’ (it hasn’t), we appealed the valuation using information that wasn’t over a year old (unlike the surveyor) and got nowhere. 

Upshot is that we had to find several grand more and will now pay an extra £100 per month because of Connells’ incompetence.

Avoid.