underpinned house
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Sunszajn
Posts: 7
Joined: Sep 2014
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25-10-2014 10:43 PM
Hi,
We are looking at a house in HOP.
It has been underpinned in the past.
Does anyone have experience or lives in a house that is underpinned?
I guess insurance will be expensive and it might be trickier to sell in the future?...
Any thoughts?
thank you in advance
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rshdunlop
Posts: 1,111
Joined: Jun 2008
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25-10-2014 11:09 PM
I've lived in two underpinned houses. The first was underpinned while we lived there. Done on our insurance. No problem selling it on, no hike in our insurance premium. The house we currently own was underpinned about ten years before we bought it. The only potential downside is that you are usually tied to the insurer who was insuring the property when the underpinning was done so you can't shop around. However, I recently checked with a specialist broker and he said our current premiums were no higher than normal market rates.
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Nellienoodle
Posts: 23
Joined: Feb 2013
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26-10-2014 07:19 AM
Our house is underpinned. My husband is in property insurance and says he'd rather live in a house that has already been pinned as there's less chance of something going wrong! We got a full structural survey from a specialist surveyor nonetheless. He was amazing!
Make sure you ask for as much info about the work as you can from the sellers and get any guarantees. I checked out the company who provided a guarantee on our house to make sure they were still solvent.
With insurance, it can depend how old the work is. If it's more than 15 years you may not have to declare it (check the wording carefully). Also check whether the mortgage company has imposed a particular excess as a condition on the mortgage. Our mortgage company wanted £2k, whereas the insurers wanted us to pay £2.5k so we would have been in breach of the mortgage unless we'd spotted it. We use a specialist broker in Maidstone and our premiums aren't too bad. We couldn't go with the previous insurer for a number of reasons, including the fact that it was Notthern Rock!
Good luck!
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Sunszajn
Posts: 7
Joined: Sep 2014
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26-10-2014 10:18 AM
thank you both very much for your messages, very helpful
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Jane2
Posts: 221
Joined: Jan 2007
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01-11-2014 10:55 PM
Yes our house is under pinned and we were aware of this when we bought it. The downside is our insurance is more expensive. However a lot of houses in this area have been underpinned it's quite common due to the nature of the clay soil and the way the houses were built.
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