Anyone experienced this?
In the process of moving & my buyers mortgage valuation came back lower than the price we accepted?
Any thoughts appreciated.
Cheers

If they have a big deposit and they really like the house you may be OK, but I doubt it.

Tell them to arrange a new valuation using a local valuer. Too often the bank/building society arrange for a valuer who travels from somewhere else and doesn’t know the local area.

I don’t think you can dictate what valuer the buyer uses. I thought that was governed by the buyer’s lender.

Not what you want to hear, but the buyer would be daft not to use this lower valuation to knock you down a bit, especially in today’s market. It could depend on who wants the sale/purchase more.

Put yourself in their shoes. Someone is telling them that they are overpaying for your house.

The whole idea is so that the mortgage lender can judge if there is enough in the property to mitigate any risk they have if the buyer defaults on their mortgage.

As above all depends what deposit they have. There is every chance they have offered more than the “current” market value.

(remember not to take this personally)

Other valuers may give the same or different results – uncertainty probably wont go well with the lender either.

All about their deposit size (difference between the offer and value has just been wiped out effectively)

Depends entirely if you want to sell the house or not. Prices are unlikely to go up anytime soon, and I would think are probably more likely to go down a good bit further (probably as the recession ends and interest rates go up again – lots of repos will result and that will drive prices down a LOT).

What gets me about house valuers – something is worth what someone else is willing to pay for it… hence the offer surely must be the Market Value of that house.

If they put in a revised offer and you are buying somewhere else and all the sums still stack up then all is good… you may even find yourself in the same position as your buyer 😉

Mortgage valuations always err on the side of caution as they want to be sure they can get their money back if it all goes tits up . They are really saying how much they are prepared to lend on a property not telling you it’s market value .

The property market bubble hasn’t fully deflated yet and the valuer knows this. He’s looking into the future to protect the buyer and lender from negative equity.

This happened years ago with the first house I bought. The vendor naturally lowered the price to match.

Just this week, we have experienced this, we are remortgaging ours on a buy to let and they have valued it £10,000 less than we expected.
We based our valuation on the fact that next doors just sold at £125,000.00 but needed completely gutting. Ours is totally done and to a good standard. Valuer says ours is worth £130,000.00.

So they really are being cautious. Especially considering we are leaving 40% in it.

Thanks to all that posted – much food for thought.
Hurts with this going on whilst trying to have a family holiday.
Sun is out though!

What % difference in valuation? They agreed the price but if they’ll pull out if you won’t drop how easy to get a new buyer? Go for a compromise?

Two rank amateurs come up with an agreed price, one of whom questions the industry expert as it is less favourable. Yes, I’d say this is par for the course. 😉

No real difference to the “offers over” system in Scotland and historically far from unusal. I paid over valuation for my place a few years ago. The only thing is that the mortgage that your buyers will get is based on the valuation price not the sale price and it is up to them to find the difference. I appreciate that things work differently in England and that they may use this to try and get the price down but it’s not the end of the world.

Frankly this is why the home buyers packs that we have in Scotland are such a benefit as they include a mortgage valuation in them so everyone has this information up front and can make decisions accordingly.

Frankly this is why the home buyers packs that we have in Scotland are such a benefit as they include a mortgage valuation in them so everyone has this information up front and can make decisions accordingly.

Which is only valid for 3 months, after that it needs to be refreshed (read as surveyer helping themselves to some more cash from you) and in our case them dropping the valuation by a further £5k from the original survey 6 months prior

Yup and I had to do just that with a flat that I sold. Overall it’s still a better system.

IME

England – Buyer has the upper hand
Scotland – Seller has the upper hand

It is *possible* that the buyer is trying to play you to get the sale price lowered. Of course if this is valuation directly from their lender, then not likely. But it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that they’ve asked a surveyor friend to carry out the valuation, got them to state a lower value and are using it to negotiate with you…

industry expert

hmm. That’s a very loose term to use on a valuer. I thought they were basically just estate agents. They look at what recent properties on the road/area have sold for (presumably looking at Land Registry which takes a while to show up recent purchases), make some assumptions about the condition/size etc on those properties and take a punt.

That said, can’t blame them for being conservative at the moment as it protects the mortgage co. If the buyer is still within the LTV band for their mortgage will be fine. If they’re maxed out you have a problem

We had this from the other side – made offer on house, which was accepted, the valuation & HBR said the house wasn’t worth what we’d offered (around 5% less due to some work needing to be done on it).

We pointed out to the vendor that the bank would only lend us what it was worth and sent them the relevant parts of the HBR so they could see what needed doing to the house and that we weren’t taking the piss – offered them what the valuation said the house was worth in it’s present state or a couple of grand more if they sorted the problems.

(and yes, Scotland’s system is much better!)

Maybe there trying there luck to get you to take off the amount
and sell at the new amount.

Sometimes a bank will hold back a certain amount if works needs doing to the property
But thats called a Retention

Tell them to get a new valuation.

don simon – Member
Two rank amateurs come up with an agreed price, one of whom questions the industry expert as it is less favourable. Yes, I’d say this is par for the course.

One of whom is seemingly willing to put their money (or borrowed money) where their mouth is. Hard to see the MV as being other than what a willing buyer and seller agree as that’s the very definition. I’ve had involvement with valuers travelling out of their local area to value property and basing this on a small number of sales in the past 10 yrs. In those circs I think a knowledgeable local has as much chance of arriving at the true mv than the pro, probably more. All depends on the circs tho of course..

If able to I’d tell the buyer the mortgage company are valuing low and I’d only move a little as a gesture of goodwill at best.

Like Twinklydave, we’ve been through this recently with a purchase, and we found it was due to our mortgage provider being uninterested in allowing us to port the existing mortgage, and therefore trying to get rid of us as a client on that particular rate.

Another mortgage company valued the house as expected…

Worth chatting to your buyers and finding out if they have an existing favourable mortgage product they were hoping to transfer which might be holding the valuation down. The bank in question for us were Spanish.

We bought our house off plan. We had to pay several hundred pounds for a valuation of an unbuilt house.

They valued it at exactly the same price as the builder was selling it for, so they must be really good at their job and worth every penny we paid them. FFS.