Buying house horror story

jonpurshouse

I'm buying a house and have heard a lot of horror stories. Does everyone get a survey done or do you weigh up the need depending on the property in question? Two of my friends have bought horror properties and they spent £4,000 and £12,000 for repairs etc. I hope knowledgeable people on here will be able to advise.

pinkteapot

I’d always have a survey. I don’t know enough about buildings to assess them myself. 

Did your friends get surveys on those houses?

Carrot007

jonpurshouse said:

I'm buying a house and have heard a lot of horror stories. Does everyone get a survey done or do you weigh up the need depending on the property in question? Two of my friends have bought horror properties and they spent £4,000 and £12,000 for repairs etc. I hope knowledgeable people on here will be able to advise.

Those seem fairly reasonable costs for updating things needed to your taste and generaly issues the ornwers had been ignoring.

Should always be part of the plan in buying a house.

At least a 1969 and earlier one. 1970s and onwarsd come with a whole other range of issues which while not costing money are much worse to live with. (and they may cost money too, people can ruin a house in a year if they are the sort they will (but even then you would notice).

Survey. I have always seem them as pointless as I can do a quick visual myself (and the current owner is unliekly to allow anything more). However many people do not know what to look for. Choose to your level, they are cheap anyway.

happy_2008

Should always leave a contigency fund for repairs or renovations. I've just bought a property and plan to spend around 10-15k on new bath/kitchen that is long overdue.

Jeepers_Creepers

I've never had a survey carried out. 1st was an Edwardian top-floor flat, the second a mid-terraced '70s house and the last a '30s detached bungalow.

In all three cases, it was 'if it's still standing with no obvious cracks, and the roof looks ok, then the house is ok'. The interiors in all three places needed a full refurb, which is what I wanted.

But, if you don't have an awareness of what a dodgy house looks like, then - yes - survey all the way :-)

Unicorn_cottage

£4,000 and £12,000 is absolutely nothing! Do you need the house to be perfect? Not even new builds are perfect!

jonpurshouse

Sorry for the looooong delay replying everyone. No, what I meant is there were major electrical problems under floors and inside voids and the fuseboard which they didnt check and the survey didn't flag up required changing. The boiler was also very dangerous and was turned off by a gas engineer who said it was leaking in a number of places. So the defects weren't known and couldn't be predicted. Sowould you guys set aside money for these kinds of eventualities?

Thanks, Jon

Alter_ego

jonpurshouse said:

Sorry for the looooong delay replying everyone. No, what I meant is there were major electrical problems under floors and inside voids and the fuseboard which they didnt check and the survey didn't flag up required changing. The boiler was also very dangerous and was turned off by a gas engineer who said it was leaking in a number of places. So the defects weren't known and couldn't be predicted. Sowould you guys set aside money for these kinds of eventualities?

Thanks, Jon

 A normal survey wouldn't show these defects anyway. It would just advise getting an expert.

SpendsLikeAnAubergine

I found my recent homebuyer survey useful. I don't know a lot about building construction and maintenance so it gives peace of mind. If there are major problems, you will still need to get extra advice and inspections from more specialised professionals (electrican, gas engineer, structural engineer and so on).

lookstraightahead

Doesn't sound like a horror story to me.
Sounds normal. Remember you're not buying from new with everything new.

also your friends should've invested in a full survey. Buyer beware.

BikingBud

Unicorn_cottage said:

£4,000 and £12,000 is absolutely nothing! Do you need the house to be perfect? Not even new builds are perfect!

I know this is also a delayed response but advising people that you have no knowledge about, either in terms of their disposable income or the percentage of the purchase cost, that £4k and £12k is absolutely nothing is extremely misleading. The OP didn't contextualise the figures, (although use of the phrase horror stories does give a clue) but you cannot assume that these are trivial sums for people that may be scraping a deposit and banking on SDLT holiday to achieve their "dream" of getting into the great property game.