Underpinning, but no subsidence - a house buying dealbreaker?

amyr

Fortunately, we're still in the early stages of the buying process, but we've just found out the house we offered on has been partially underpinned. Bah. 

It's a Victorian property which had a 2.5m wall in the kitchen extension underpinned in 2005. The vendor has declared it wasn't due to subsidence, and that they simply discovered this part of the property had shallow foundations. The paperwork they've supplied appears to confirm this and it was fully signed off by Building Regulations. 

We feel thoroughly conflicted. It's a '10-year house', not a forever home, and we've heard such horror stories about resale issues and insurance that we're leaning towards pulling out. 

There's a dearth of information about preventative underpinning - does it even make a difference or is this typically viewed the same way as underpinning due to subsidence?

Would you ever entertain underpinning like this, or would this be an outright deal breaker? 

NQManchester

We’ve just removed an internal load bearing wall and had to check the foundations would be adequate to support the new load in the corners… turns out our foundations are only 3 bricks deep! We then basically would have had to do some underpinning or have a smaller opening internally. We opted for the smaller opening due to cost and fuss but I’d not considered it might have put future buyers off if we’d gone with the underpinning. 

Absolutely not an expert at all but aren’t mortgage companies/insurance normally interested if it’s subsidence/movement which this doesn’t sound like it is? 

I’d  want to see the original engineer reports and get your own engineer to take a look. Sounds like they might have just been doing things properly. 

Definitely worth further investigation but it wouldn’t make me automatically run for the hills.