Nervous First Time Buyer

It's the gamble you take Tim. Most people are honest and sometimes you just have to trust them, otherwise you can miss out. Why this obsession with the central heating? It's the flat roofs I'd be worrying about.

"Troy Steadman" wrote

Of course, and I totally agree on that point.

But to suggest that "...it is for the buyer to satisfy themselves that things work", is a bit rich when the seller is not allowing the buyer to do just that!

"Richard Faulkner" wrote

I can just see the conversation now :-

Buyer: "Does that work?" Seller: "Ah, you need to check that yourself!" Buyer: "OK, can I turn it on please?" Seller: "Nope, absolutely NOT!!" Buyer: "Hmmmm." ...

In message , Tim writes

I dont make the rules - I guess a seller who wont turn things on is saying "take it or leave it", and is willing to accept that they may not get as much as they would if they accommodated all requests.

A seller who isn't willing to switch on the central heating is probably behaving unreasonably, unless he has had the entire system drained and does not want to pay a plumber to fill the system and then drain it again afterwards. If that is the case perhaps the buyer could offer to contribute to the cost of this work.

Quite, but a buyer would be a fool to volunteer to pay for this, unless he is certain his offer will be accepted. This is for the same reason that you folk down south don't employ a surveyor before making a binding offer.

Would it not be much simpler to *assume* all the systems are in working order, to determine the price offered on that basis, and to make it a condition of the contract that in fact they will be working at completion date or the seller will be responsible for paying to have them fixed?

In message , The Todal writes

My impression was that the C/H was drained down - if it isnt, then of course it is simple to switch things on and see what happens.

I used to deal with lots of empty properties and they were usually closed down so as to protect them from frost and squatters - i.e. all water drained, inc. C/H, elec and gas turned off, (easy to turn on), and usually no bulbs

1986 we bought a house from the local building society. We asked the agent about the central heating system and got a verbal assurance that it worked. When we got in we couldn't get it to work. A heating engineer we called in condemned it. Neither BS or agent would take responsibility. We had to shell out for a new central heating boiler and gas fire.

Digging up all the tulips, crocuses, and daffodils is going just a touch too far, don't you think?

You should have sued the pair of them jointly.

The law was not framed adequately at that time for such an action to be a sure success although I'd be more ready to do so in the same circumstances now.

"Ronald Raygun" wrote

Did you get something the wrong way round here?

The English ("south of the border"!) don't usually make a binding offer (ie "exchange contracts") until after they've employed the surveyor...

"Ronald Raygun" wrote

I suppose it may be difficult for the seller, after having vacated and then the buyer suddenly saying "this don't work!", to prove that the systems *did* work at completion...

[Dishonest buyers might sabotage the central heating and then try to obtain a brand-spanking new system, paid for by the seller!]

Sorry. Replace " binding" with "n". Point is that when you "make an offer" you don't really, and therefore an "acceptance" isn't really either, and the whole system is a pig's breakfast.

Fine. The traditional Scottish system involved making proper binding offers (i.e. capable of being accepted) from the outset, and therefore surveyors were engaged prior to making an offer which might well fail to be accepted, thus wasting many survey fees. More recently the habit of making offsers "subject to survey" has caught on, in full knowledge that this proviso would be totally unacceptable to the seller. But the way it has been made to work is that if the seller is otherwise minded to go ahead, a qualified (i.e. conditional) acceptance will be given, the condition being that the buyer remove the "subject to survey" condition of his original offer. This works in practice because a surveyor can be instructed at very short notice, and give an immediate verbal report sufficient for the buyer to make a yes/no decision, all within the deadline allowed by the seller within which the buyer must accept the seller's offer to accept the buyer's offer.

Fair point, but that wouldn't work. Quite apart from the fact that the dishonest buyer risks falling foul of forensic evidence which could prove sabotage, the seller would not be liable for any element of betterment, but only, even when the system is so beyond repair that replacement is the only viable option, for such reasonable proportion of the replacement cost as would be equivalent to what a repair might have cost had it been economically viable. This sounds very woolly, but typically the problem is likely to be unavailability of spares for an obsolete model, and in such case an equivalent cost of repairing the nearest-equivalent non-obsolete model might be taken.

Besides, the sale being in the bag, it would be in the seller's interest to make sure (via his agent) that the system is in fact working on handover day, and to arrange for the buyer's agent to witness this.

Ideally, of course, the system would be subject to a maintenance contract which is transferrable, so the whole issue would be a non-problem.