House we are buying needs new roof, rewiring and new boiler, should we ask for money off?!

katejo

powerful_Rogue said:

CulBul85 said:

donutandbeer said:

You can ask and your vendor can refuse. I have made offers before on houses that I guess would need rewiring and already factored that price into my offer. Other buyers might have as well.

Roof I would think maybe not that easy to spot unless it’s literally falling apart. 

Boiler - I almost always ask how old the boiler is (or at least look at it and sort of guess) when viewing houses. So cost of new boiler would also have been factored in my offer.

That being said - if you won’t be able to afford the house otherwise then you just have to ask. Maybe the vendor will agree to go half way, but maybe they will try to relist the house or go back to other offers. 

Thank you for your response it’s been an extremely stressful year trying to secure a property in our town. We love this house but I do feel it is too much for us If there are thousands of pounds worth of stuff to do. 

We did ask about the boiler and that is 20 years old so we knew that would need doing. I just wanted to know if it was standard practice to ask for reductions because we’ve never done this before thanks again for your response

Just because a boiler is 20 years old, does not mean it needs replacing. House I sold last year the boiler was 16 years old, serviced and worked. I certainly wouldn't have entertained revised offer based on that.

I have just replaced a boiler which was 20 years old. It was still safe and had been serviced annually but was struggling to keep the temperature in my house above 16 C in the coldest months. The new one is so much better. Fortunately I already had the money set aside to do it but this would be much harder for a FTB on a very tight budget.

theoretica

How much will lowering your offer actually help you with affording the work that needs/you want doing?  If your mortgage LTV is high then you probably could not keep much of your deposit back to pay for work, but instead the lender would lend less.  If that is the case you would end up with a slightly lower mortgage payment, but not enough cash to afford the work.  Do work through the full finances carefully to work out if this property is still feasible for you.