In progress of buying a house and Level 3 Survey has revealed ...

Johndudeandkittens

stuart45 said:

It could do, but remedial work is normally carried out before it gets that far.

Wow, do you know roughly what the sorta costs would be for such remedial work? would it be fair to say it could exceed 5k?

stuart45

Be well over 5k if the whole wall needed rebuilding. That's a worst case scenario though.

youth_leader

I would recommend getting a reputable builder to give you a quote, you could then use this to negotiate with the sellers. 

Johndudeandkittens

Yeah so I've instructed a structural engineer to go out and look at the wall and the whole house. So far , it's looking worrying to be honest.... and quite possibly going to have to pull out. But we'll see what the engineer says

Johndudeandkittens

Hey so the structual engineer came back and advised that the wall was essentially the result of "movement" at the front of the property. They believe the front of the property appears newer than the rest of the property and so it is possible that this was remedial work to correct the movement, it may not be however. Ultimately they believe the movement is long standing and is not corrent or on-going and the only suggested work is to fix the crack under the bay window.

Bigphil1474

We had subsidence in our old house 15 years ago. The bay moved forward about 4cm due to a long standing leak in a water board drain. The house was all fixed up by the insurance and no issues. That bay will always be 4cm off vertical if it was straight before, but it won't move any more. When you insure it, be sure to mention that there is long standing historical movement just in case.

prettyandfluffy

We had the same situation with the first house we bought; a Victorian terrace with a rear extension - built immediately after the main house by the same builder - which provided a kitchen and third bedroom.  However the extension appeared to have settled.  We had a structural engineer to look at it, he said it had moved but a very long time ago and as it was built on chalk it wasn't likely to go anywhere.  The whole street had the same rear extension and our neighbours who had been there for 30 years said theirs had also had historic settlement.  We got our mortgage, stayed for 12 years and sold without any problems.

Johndudeandkittens

Hi all thank you for all the input. The structural engineer came out and the report they gave raised more questions than answers however, they did , to some degree, state that the "movement" whatever it is, was a long time ago and doesn't appear to be on going or current. Unfortunately though, they also have disclaimers that basically say if we're wrong, then you can't do anything either. So by chance, we looked at rightmove (as it's crunch time now) and found another property that had just gone on and was in a much better location, its newer, no leaning wall, no river under it or part of it and so we decided that it would be best to just not gamble with this wall issue. The final nail in the coffin so to speak was when we spoke with insurance companies and they advised that IF the wall were to come down or the movement were to start again, they would not cover the claim if the reason behind the wall moving or coming down is due to river erosion (there's a river that runs under the house and along the garden) so essentially the costs of 10s of thousands could fall to us. Can't take that risk and with this better hoouse that came on the market (and our offfer accepted) it was a no brainer, we had to pull out.

Its not what anyone wants to hear, from their point of view and I totally get it, we spend 2 years trying to sell our last property because it had currrent subsidence claims going on and a section 20 repair bill of around £12,000  (leasehold) we sold at a loss and do not want to make these kind of mistakes again. I know it's not quite the same thing, but yeah.

Appreciate all the comments and advice. Just wanted to give some closure to this thread should anyone stumble across it in the future!