Q. The property I’m buying has just been down valued by the surveyor, is there anything I can do?
A. Unfortunately down valuations happen from time to time and are becoming increasingly frequent during these uncertain times. When you want to take out a mortgage on a property the lender will always send out a surveyor that’s acting on their behalf to value the property so that the lender can feel confident that the money they lending against the property is safe. Now however, surveyors are being even more cautious than they were before as they have a huge liability to the lender in this respect, to the point where the lender can pursue them as a company or personally if they feel the valuation was incorrect even if it’s as in some cases years after the property was first valued. As you can imagine with the market such as this surveyors have very little comparable evidence around to compare new valuations with, so in many cases struggle to value the property up to the price it has been agreed at. When this happens it’s referred to as a ‘down valuation’. There are a few things that you can do in this event. Firstly speak to your agent, if they feel strongly that this is incorrect then they will try to collect as much comparable evidence of similar stock that has been sold recently to present to the surveyor in the hope that he will be prepared to revise his figure back up. If this doesn’t work, your agent can go back to their seller and ask if he would be prepared to reduce the price of the property, most sellers are not usually willing or able to reduce by the whole amount but are however prepared to negotiate and meet the buyer half way to make up the difference the down valuation has caused.