Essential repairs and formal mortgage offer

Dutchgirl_2

Dear all,

I'm new on this forum, although I've been reading the posts before - very useful!

I would like advice about the following. I'm in the process of buying a house and I'm now at the stage that I'm waiting for a formal mortgage offer from Alliance and Leicester. The one issue remaining is the opinion of the surveyor who did the basic valuation about additional reports that I've commissioned. The surveyor mentioned some essential repairs (brickwork to be repaired and damp treatment), which were then priced at £1200 by the specialised reports. My question is whether this amount can be expected to be an issue for the mortgage lender (i.e. a reason to retain funds or to demand that the repairs be carried out before the formal mortgage offer/completion). My broker told me that it was unlikely that £1200 of repairs on a total purchase price of £152000 would jeopardise the offer, but I'm still very concerned about this.

I have already negotiated a lower purchase price, but because I'm a first time buyer, I don't have the cash at this particular moment to carry out the repairs before I move in.

Many thanks for your insights.

Woby_Tide

it's probably 99.9% unlikely to make a difference. The mortgage company can't expect you to carry out repairs on a house you don't actually own. Fair enough if it was significant structural defects but nearly every survey will highlight damp/brickwork problems. it's a way for the surveyor to justify they did actually visit the property

cattie

Some years ago I bought a Victorian property & my surveyor's report had mentioned both a damp problem & some brickwork needing repointing. It shouldn't be an issue for your mortgage company at all. It's such a small amount & pretty easy for the faults to be remedied when you have the funds. Don't leave the damp problem too long though as it could get worse.

Just as a point of interest, when I actually called in the damp proof specialist to do my work ( he did the brickwork too incidentally ), the final bill turned out to be less than the original estimate, as things were not quite as bad as originally thought.

GreenB_2

What is possible is that the mortgage company may do is lend you the money on the basis that the work is carried out with x number of days from completion.

fluffymuffin

I agree with the above - its called retention.

We bought an old victorian house over a year ago and it had loads to do to it - we knew this its why we bought it - some of which was damp proofing and party wall improvements due to new fire regs. We had to pay a retention fee to the mortgage company on top of our deposit which was refunded when the works were done. This was because the repairs were potentially damaging to the structure and safety of the property or couold cause liability issue in the event of an incident (i.e. a fire).
There was no time scale assigend though.

However! We used the quotes we got for building works to negotiate on the price of the property - the buyer ended up giving us £750 half the price of the proposed works. This was great for us because the quotes we got were really high and we did most of the work ourselves.

Could casue you an issue potentially if you dont have the extra cash in the first place.

This is based on my own experience so if I have got anything wrong sorry - I am sure someone will correct me but this is how it worked for us.

Good luck!