Unless you do it for a living, buying a house is stressful, expensive, and fraught with danger for the unwary.
Despite this, many hundreds of thousands of people every year voluntarily put themselves through the heartache and expense of buying a house. A large proportion of these, either do not realise the potential dangers, or naively ignore them, and fail to ask for or take appropriate advice - sadly, more than a few end up ruing this.
Although I do not claim any special expertise in the house buying process, over the years I have been involved in various professional capacities as well as buying personally. As such, the following may be of help.
Documents you should read before committing yourself.
Since 2006, there have been some major changes in the documentation available to you, when buying a house. The new documents available to you, come in the form of a Home Information Pack (HIP). You should always insist on seeing the Home Information Pack for any house that you are interested in, before making an offer.
A variety of documents are contained within the Home Information Pack. As the name suggests, these are all concerned with providing essential information to you about the house. The contents do vary, and the documents required are gradually being increased. Things you may want to pay particular attention to are as follows:
- Energy Performance Certificate (EPC). Most people think this is just a pretty little graph that appears on the end of the estate agents details, this is not so! The graph is just the top half of the first page from a five or six page report. The certificates are intended to be used to compare likely running costs of similar type homes, and include recommendations for improvements appropriate to the style and type of home, to reduce the running costs. They will also give you some good indications about work that has been done on the house to maintain and improve it. For instance, if a house has recently been overhauled/improved but the EPC shows a need for loft insulation and secondary glazing (double glazing should never be specified for period windows) you should question the quality and extent of the work. Alternatively if a house has been lived in by the same person for many years and the EPC shows the heating system needs improvement along with the loft insulation, it indicates only basic improvements and maintenance have probably been carried out elsewhere too, so things like the wiring and plumbing ought to be checked.
- Site plan. This shows you the full extent of what you are officially buying together with what surrounded the land at the time the plan was drawn and any rights of way or flying freeholds affecting the property. There is no guarantee that the plan actually matches the reality, particularly with period houses, or that it matches what you think you are buying. It is important therefore that you study the plan and compare it with what you can physically see at the property. The sorts of thing that often show up, is the access drive not belonging to the house, or the neighbours enjoying a right of way across the garden. As the plan shows the surroundings at the time it was drawn, you may also learn some information you should know about the area. For instance, it may show former industrial premises adjoined in the past which may have contaminated the soil, or it may reveal old watercourses that have been filled in leading to potential flooding.
- Other plans. A good Home Information Pack is likely to include additional plans too. A sewer plan is especially desirable! These can very important to your enjoyment of the house. It is possible for mains sewers in the past to run beneath houses and as a result be prone to damage. A sewer plan will show if they run beneath the building in which case, they ought to be checked before you buy. If the ground slopes anywhere in the vicinity of the house, check to see how many buildings the sewers serve and where the sewers run in relation to the house. Old sewers often snake around and do not run where you would expect. If they service a lot of houses on higher ground before they get to you, a blockage further down will result in sewage backing up into your home, also heavy storms may cause the sewers to overflow and flood you. A sewer plan will enable you to make a judgement on these possibilities or at least ask the right questions.
- Home Condition Report (HCR). You should always ask to see this report for any house you are interested in buying, but it is an optional document within the pack, so is only present when the seller is serious about moving and has nothing to hide. It's an impartial report by an independent, statutorily regulated inspector, on the true condition of the various parts of the building and the urgency of any work required. It also flags up any potential conveyancing issues apparent during the inspection. Any urgent works revealed in the report should either have been rectified by the seller already with appropriate receipts included in the Home Information Pack, or estimates obtained and included in the pack with an appropriate adjustment to the asking price. Of course, if there is no Home Condition Report, you will have to glean what you can from things like the EPC and make your own judgements about what the owner is either not revealing about the building's condition or how committed they are to selling.
Professionals that you should expect to be involved.
There are a number of different professionals that you either need to take advice from or you should expect to be involved with in some other capacity:
- Legal conveyancer. They are responsible for safeguarding your legal interests and ensuring you buy what you think you are buying. Apart from the obvious things you can see, this includes all the various 3rd party rights over and under the land, 3rd party obligations towards the land and buildings, your rights over and under adjacent land, and your obligations towards adjacent land and buildings. In East Anglia, as the concentration of medieval churches is so high, the checks for obligations towards other buildings is particularly important. If the church owned land or buildings in the past, it was often sold with an obligation in perpetuity for all subsequent owners to pay for maintenance of the parish church chancel. The church repair obligations are not necessarily on former rectories and vicarages either, they can be on a single very modest Edwardian semi-detached house for instance. The conveyancer also checks the seller has the right to sell both the property and all the attendant legal rights that come with it. In East Anglia you cannot assume that all the legal rights relating to a property come with it - they have often become divorced from the property in the past. Sporting rights often come into this category, for instance shooting and fishing rights over the property may have been retained by a former owner.
- Mortgage valuer. This is one professional that causes most confusion. Most people think a mortgage 'surveyor' is a building surveyor acting for them, whereas in reality, he is a specialist valuer acting for the mortgage company, and may not even need to go into the house. Their sole concern is whether the value of the house is sufficient to cover the amount borrowed if it has to be resold quickly in a poor state of repair.
- Specialist residential buildings surveyor. These are responsible for
advising you on the current and projected weather tightness, structural
stability and integrity of the building. This is true regardless of
the age of the
building. When recent work has been carried out on the house this often
involves detailed on-site detective work to try and determine if anything
has been covered up and whether the work has been done properly. It is important
to use the correct specialist surveyor for the type of house you are
buying. While many buildings suffer from similar minor problems, different
types and age of building vary markedly in their symptoms and behaviour when
it comes to more serious defects. In fact the same problem can be a major
defect in one type of house but just a minor problem of no consequence in
another type. Most residential building surveyors, are proficient in houses with
brick, block or stone cavity walls built using cement mortar, and ranging
in age from 10 years old to the late 1930s, and will be familiar with
the different problems found in particular age bands within that range.
Other surveyors you should typically seek out as appropriate are:
- Specialists in houses up to 10 years old (snagging surveyors fall into this category). They will check the house has been built and finished correctly, and conforms to all relevant regulations (it is surprisingly rare for them to conform and be finished correctly), as well as looking for signs of premature deterioration.
- Specialists in modern timber frames and non-standard construction types of the 1950s and 1960s. They will check for signs of deterioration which are unique to these types of house, and also, unsuitable alterations (which could be as seemingly trivial as the wrong replacement windows) that have damaged the structural integrity of the house.
- Specialists in period houses - this refers to the construction type, not the visible 'period features'. They are proficient in houses with early (experimental) cavity walls used into the 1920s and the various vernacular building types that proliferated in your local area prior to the First World War. These houses are very vulnerable to degradation and problems arising from modern building materials and techniques. These surveyors therefore check for any inappropriate building work carried out during the last 100 years and assess the likelihood of it causing future degradation, as well as looking for any signs of existing problems caused by it.
- Builder. They are required to provide estimates for any essential work recommended by your surveyor and separate estimates for any alterations you may want (which should have been mentioned to your surveyor prior to his inspection so he could check the viability for you and make allowances in his recommendations). If the house is brand new or less 10 years old, any remedial work is likely to be the responsibility of the original developer in which case you will want to know when the remedial works can be carried out and how disruptive they will be.
See the other pages in this section for information on specific survey packages available when you want to buy a period house. If you have further queries about buying a period house that I can advise you on, use the form below and I will try to help.
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