Valuation down valued by 100,000 21 October 2022 at 12:26PM in Mortgages & endowments 29 replies 3.1K views

sarah_blue

mi-key said:

It is better to look on rightmove at recent sold prices to get a real idea. If Zoopla say the ones either side are worth £500K they are probably actually worth £400K 

Also as others said, does the valuation actually make any difference to the remortgage offer they are making? This would depend on the equity you have etc.. It could be that it would end up being the same even with the lower valuation

Thanks - yes just looked at Zoopla as that is apparently a starting point for valuations - tbh my experience has always been that they are less than the market price. In any case in terms of real value the 500k value is more like it. Other houses on the street that are smaller have sold for a lot more than the 420k that ours was valued for and the footprint is almost double the size, as is the garden. If it was going on the market we could realistically expect to get 565k. I know that mortgage purposes it is often less but I wouldn’t have thought that much less. Looking at the reviews though this valuations company has form for this - perhaps why the mortgage company uses them!

dander

I can't tell from your posts if the valuer has actually been to the property or if this is just a drive-by or even a desk valuation. I would think if the valuer hasn't been to the house they could be missing the details of the renovations, and maybe you can request a more full valuation.
I might be wrong, but I think when I remortgaged last year (NatWest), they gave me a choice of valuations - with the basic desk one being free and others would cost me extra fees. I went for the free one because my LTV is low enough that the valuation is fairly irrelevant, but I do remember it coming in quite a chunk lower than properties were selling in my road, and definitely lower than the Zoopla price. But at the time prices were absolutely rocketing here, so I assumed it was a bit of a lag rather than deliberate scheming. I imagine I could have upgraded to a paid one if I needed the valuation to be higher, but for me it didn't actually matter so I just accepted the lowball valuation.
The only other guess is that sometimes big extensions don't add as much value as they cost - if the property ends up out of synch with the area it's in, that seems to put people off. Roads/areas can have a ceiling price that properties won't sell above because that price opens up other options that people won't compromise on.

sarah_blue

Thanks - actually it was a physical valuation. Although we didn’t have to pay for it. The house is definitely worth the money - a year ago one on the opposite side of the road with a slightly smaller extension sold for 540k but prices have gone up since then. I actually found an employee feedback site for the valuation company on which one of the current Surveyors gave it a one star as a place to work siting stress and pressure to downvalue being negatives. This does tally largely with what the surveyor who attended said.

Oh well - it’s looking like it’s not going to be easy to resolve. My main motivation for posting here was just to find out if anyone else had the same experience and if they managed to do anything about it but this is looking unlikely.

mi-key

Is it worth asking the mortgage company if they would accept an independent valuation by someone else, and you pay for it? Tell them you have concerns about the company who did it, and also that the valuation seems way out?  It's not really in their interest to have properties downvalued as they want people to borrow as much as possible

sarah_blue

We are definitely going to try that - just whether they will accept it. At the moment they are saying there is no facility to appeal so we might have to try some other lenders or wait until things are hopefully a bit more stable and all this madness has died down.

Thanks so much for your input.

JMA74

Depending on the lender you can pay for a 2nd opinion from a different valuer.  Santander allow this for example. 
Be careful though as if the 2nd one comes in lower they will go with that instead. 

You've got to price in a lot of pessimism in the market at the moment.  What completed 6 months ago was in a completely different economic outlook for lenders 

MattMattMattUK

sarah_blue said:

We are definitely going to try that - just whether they will accept it. At the moment they are saying there is no facility to appeal so we might have to try some other lenders or wait until things are hopefully a bit more stable and all this madness has died down.

Thanks so much for your input.

It will depend what you mean by madness, 5-7% rates are likely here for several years, or a decade if anyone but Sunak wins the Conservative Party leadership contest.

mi-key

sarah_blue said:

We are definitely going to try that - just whether they will accept it. At the moment they are saying there is no facility to appeal so we might have to try some other lenders or wait until things are hopefully a bit more stable and all this madness has died down.

Thanks so much for your input.

Perhaps threatening to leave for a different lender will make a difference as they never like losing business

simon_or

mi-key said:

sarah_blue said:

We are definitely going to try that - just whether they will accept it. At the moment they are saying there is no facility to appeal so we might have to try some other lenders or wait until things are hopefully a bit more stable and all this madness has died down.

Thanks so much for your input.

Perhaps threatening to leave for a different lender will make a difference as they never like losing business

There's nothing to walk away from and I doubt that a Halifax or a NatWest would at all care either way.