RICS value v bank’s value

Ayaboe

Hi all,

I wonder if we could get your thoughts on our current scenario please:

We bought a flat about 4 years ago using the HTB equity loan. Our circumstances changed hugely last year due to work and we now are not living it. We don’t want to sell it so are attempting to remortgage to a buy-to-let mortgage so that we can rent it out - and in the process of the remortgaging, pay off the equity loan.

Our mortgage broker found us a lender, and we went ahead and arranged the RICS survey to get it valued for HTB repayment purposes. Came back with a figure of £175k.

Two weeks later the bank sends their valuer around, this came back with a value of £155k.

Now I was aware that their might be a bit of a difference between the two figures, but £20k on a 1 bed flat of this value seems quite a big discrepancy? We thought we would query the £175k figure with our surveyor and they told us we would need to provide 3 comparable properties to support the lower figure. The broker asked the bank for a copy of their survey, and to my surprise they sent it to us but the ‘comparable property’ section is blank. The estimate figure at the start of the banks survey was the £175k so it’s not clear to me how they have arrived at the final figure of £155k without comparables. If we want to appeal the banks value they have said we need 3 comparable properties - but the comparables on the RICS survey are older than this so we can’t use them.

Feeling a bit stuck here. It seems strange to me that we will have to pay the government back a proportionate slice of the £175k when the bank are telling us it’s not worth that…. Now if we want to go through with the remortgage then we’ll have to stump up the difference to the tune of around £14k, it’s not out of the question for us, so if we have no other options then we will just go ahead and do it rather than have the place sat empty…

Just hoping to get a few other people’s thoughts on this really- is it usual for values to vary this much? Is there anything we should be doing here or is it just a case of paying the difference and getting on with it?!

Thank you for taking the time to read!

MWT

Ayaboe said:

 - but the comparables on the RICS survey are older than this so we can’t use them.

How old are they?

getmore4less

Have you looked for your own comparables

The sold data is available on land reg

Ayaboe

MWT said:

Ayaboe said:

 - but the comparables on the RICS survey are older than this so we can’t use them.

How old are they?

One is from Nov 2020
The second and third are the same property sold twice: Feb 2021 and March 2021

Ayaboe

getmore4less said:

Have you looked for your own comparables

The sold data is available on land reg

Thank you, we will definitely look at doing this