Singing Pig

I have agreed a purchase on a property with some subsidence issues that need resolving, on the condition that an insurance claim is approved by insurers before completion.

However I am not sure how long this could take because I know sometimes they will monitor the structure for some time to assess if it is still moving or not.  My plan was to purchase cash, and once the repairs had been made remortgage to get money back out.  I have not factored in my cash potentially being tied up for longer than 6 months.

Has anyone else had similar claims, and if so how long did they take before works were started? 

Regards

Rob

Hi Rob,

No experience re. an investment property but my last PPR was revealed to have subsidence by the Surveyor acting for the purchaser's lender.  To cut a long story short, from diagnosis to remedy took seven months but that was after we made a huge effort to become friendly with the guy in charge of the works (we'd already found the property we wanted to move into and begged!).  We were told that usually the property would be monitored for six months to assess what work needed doing, ie. does it need underpinning or just "sticking together", but fortunately they agreed to do the remedial work without monitoring it first.  This was helped by the fact that they identified the cause very quickly, assessed the damage so far, and were confident that the property did not need underpinning, but merely bolting together.

From my experience, I wouldn't like to be depending on a maximum six month timescale.

Best of luck with it all.

Thanks for the info Rowan.  I had suspected as much.  The property needs total renovation anyway but of course I can't start that until the subsidence is resolved.

I think I may need to drop my offer to account for the additional £1K per month my finance is costing me, but I never really like doing this.  First thing though is to get vendor to instigate claim to see what the insurance assessors think.

Regards

Rob

Hi Rob, 

I would be looking at a minimum of 6 months monitoring but maybe 12 months if there is the possibility that the subsidence is due to trees being in the vicinity and/or clay subsoils being present. The Structural Engineers will generally want to monitor through all four seasons if this is the case, hence the 12 months. You will then obviously also need to allow for the time it takes you to complete whatever remedial/cosmetic works are required to reinstate the property, before you can remortgage it.

Do you have any indications yourself of what may have caused the subsidence ie trees/clay, leaking drains etc and how far progressed/extensive it is ie is it just a few cracks in the masonry externally/plasterwork internally or are you looking at localised rebuilding, relevelling sloping floors etc.

Mr M 

Rob,

Just to emphasise if you can diagnose the problem, you might be able to hurry things along.  In our case, it was immediately diagnosed as being a leaking drain and therefore it was easy to predict future movement and what it would take to remedy it.  Then it was just a case of getting on bended knee to stick us at the top of the list of the contractors who did the remedial work.