The Property Buying Question That Could Have Saved Me Thousands

Buying a home is one of the most exciting things you'll ever do. It's also, as I discovered, one of the easiest ways to inherit someone else's problem without ever knowing it was there…

I started my property purchase in 2020 and did everything I thought you were supposed to do. I viewed the property, liked it, made an offer and appointed a solicitor. I asked the questions I knew to ask, but what I didn't know, and what nobody told me, was that there were questions I wasn't asking.

One of those questions was about building regulations and a loft conversion in the property.

The conversion looked fine, it had been there for years. Nothing in the listing flagged it, nothing in the process raised any concerns and in the chaos of contracts, deadlines and deposit transfers, the building regulations compliance of a loft conversion wasn't something that crossed my mind to verify.

Why would it? I was a solo buyer, not a building inspector.

I had done what you're supposed to do. I appointed the professionals whose job it is to protect you through the process. What I know now is that even with the right people in place, things can fall through the cracks. And when they do, it's the buyer who lives with the consequences. What I eventually discovered was that the works hadn't been properly signed off and had no completion certificate. There was no evidence that the conversion had ever been inspected and approved, just a conversion that looked perfectly normal from the outside, concealing a serious compliance issue underneath.

One with both safety implications and a significant price tag, the kind of price tag that makes you need to have a sit down.

Resolving the issue runs into the tens of thousands of pounds. I'm not going to go into the full detail here, partly because the situation is still ongoing, but the number is significant enough that it changed things.

The point is that the whole situation was avoidable. Not because I should have known better, but because the right question, asked to the right person at the right stage of the buying process, could have surfaced the issue before I exchanged contracts. I could have walked away, renegotiated or at the very least made an informed decision.

That's the thing nobody really tells you about buying a home, you don't need to be an expert. You just need to know which questions to ask, even the ones that seem obvious, because obvious things can and do get missed. The right question at the right moment is often your best protection.

And you deserve to walk into that process armed with it.

I'm not a solicitor or a surveyor, but I am someone who has been through the process and learned from it in the most expensive way possible. Years of research, conversations with other buyers and careful consideration of each stage of a property purchase later, the Home Truths Guide exists.

The consequences of that missed question are still being felt today, in building work costs and expensive legal fees. That's exactly why I built this guide, so others don't have to find out the hard way.

Here's to smooth moves,

Charlotte

Founder, Home Truths

So what should buyers ask about property alterations?

If a property has had any alterations (new or old), such as a loft conversion, garage conversion, extension or structural work, one important question to ask is whether the work has been approved under building regulations and whether a completion certificate exists. Many buyers assume that if something looks finished and has been in place for years, it must have been properly signed off. Unfortunately that's not always the case.

Before buying a property it's worth asking:

• Was this work carried out with building regulations approval?

• Is there a completion certificate from the local authority?

• Has the work been inspected and signed off?

These are simple questions not many of us will usually encounter in our day-to-day, but they can reveal serious issues that might otherwise stay hidden until after you've exchanged contracts. It's also worth remembering that you don't need to already know or suspect that work has been done to ask these questions. A good solicitor should be raising these points regardless, but there's no harm in asking them directly too. Very few buyers are property experts, and the whole point of having the right questions in front of you is that you don't have to already know the answer to know it's worth asking.

Image Credit: Lucija Ros on Unsplash