Over-the-top surveyor destroyed our house sale

diggingdude

youth_leader said:

I understand your anger, I had a magnificent 1847 grade II listed and the buyer's surveyor had no appreciation of the magnificence of the build.  He even suggested every ceiling needed to be replaced. As he left he whispered in my ear 'your water tank has a leak' which really worried me - plumber said it was like the drip off a teacup and the joint was good for another ten years, another £200 I shouldn't have had to spend.  I hope you get a cash buyer who loves the house for what it is, sadly the 'one' for me didn't turn up.

Thing is though it was leaking so the surveyor was right 👍 well spotted actually 

diggingdude

ClockworkTV said:

We're selling our property (some parts 300 years old) which we bought several years ago and did a lot of refurbishment on. It took a while to get a buyer. Everything was going well until the buyer's surveyor came to do a 'structural' survey (normal for old buildings). His report was so over the top basically trashing our house (80 pages long! - about a page for every two square metres!). It seemed to be an excercise in covering his back and found fault with all sorts of things that were not really significant (cheap to fix) or we had actually fixed or just plain wrong. Our buyers freaked out and pulled out of the sale without even any discussion. There's nothing actually seriously there to stop a purchase, the house is solid but the way he listed stuff it sounded awful. Our 'structural survey' when we bought the house was only 30 pages long and that was before we did any work on it! I'm furious and there's no come back - you can sue your own surveyor but what do you do when the buyer's surveyor basically libels your house?

Sounds like the surveyor did their job 

HotPantsCruiser

I suppose the buyer just has to figure out how much the surveyor info means to them?

newatc

After we bought our current house, I become quite annoyed at the amount of work that we needed to do within the first few years. So I got out the surveyor's report and, to my surprise, found that the survey had contained all the issues in his report. I guess we had liked the house/location so much that we interpreted his comments in a way that suited our decision!

It could be in this case, that the buyer in this case was already having doubts and the report confirmed that.

By the way, despite the extra expense we have loved our house and are glad that we made the decision to buy.

jenni_fer

Love the scoring, out of 10 for each?
Fingers crossed for you on your latest offer!