No Retention

istaunton

We are currently sale agreed and close to signing on a House in Dublin. There is an issue with an extension in that the orginal owners never had planning. The extension was built in the 70's so it well over the threshold for any objections. They also have not applied for retention on the extension. We are currently deciding on 2 options:
1. Ask vendor to get retention
2. Proceed as is and get retention ourselves

Option 1 could take months I really dont know. Option 2 is we buy as is and go for retention ourselves. However this is a risk and I would be revising my offer based on that. So the question is has anyone got any experience of this situation and if so how much did you revise offer for. Even just in a percentage term will do as I have no idea where to start.

Cheers

jimmycrackcorm

I think in your case retention is only going to be a problem when it comes to getting a mortgage signed off by the bank.

If this isn't the case then it's unlikely to be a problem given the timeframe as was for the current owners

Gumbo

istaunton wrote: »

We are currently sale agreed and close to signing on a House in Dublin. There is an issue with an extension in that the orginal owners never had planning. The extension was built in the 70's so it well over the threshold for any objections. They also have not applied for retention on the extension. We are currently deciding on 2 options:
1. Ask vendor to get retention
2. Proceed as is and get retention ourselves

Option 1 could take months I really dont know. Option 2 is we buy as is and go for retention ourselves. However this is a risk and I would be revising my offer based on that. So the question is has anyone got any experience of this situation and if so how much did you revise offer for. Even just in a percentage term will do as I have no idea where to start.

Cheers

Vendor applying for retention will delay the sale by about 3 months. It’s the safer option but you also risk the value going up and another offer being accepted higher than yours.

If you try buy as is, the bank may not release the funds.

jlm29

Your bank may or may not release funds without retention in place. If you’re relying on a mortgage to buy the house, it’s not really up to you.

thepropertyguy

istaunton wrote: »

We are currently sale agreed and close to signing on a House in Dublin. There is an issue with an extension in that the orginal owners never had planning. The extension was built in the 70's so it well over the threshold for any objections. They also have not applied for retention on the extension. We are currently deciding on 2 options:
1. Ask vendor to get retention
2. Proceed as is and get retention ourselves

Option 1 could take months I really dont know. Option 2 is we buy as is and go for retention ourselves. However this is a risk and I would be revising my offer based on that. So the question is has anyone got any experience of this situation and if so how much did you revise offer for. Even just in a percentage term will do as I have no idea where to start.

Cheers

Hi istaunton

Lots of solid advice above. To go back to your original question about what price to reduce it by. think of what you would buy the house for without the extension. As retention is not guarenteed it may be the case where you have to demolish the extension (unlikely). Furthermore, in my experience the best way to go about doing this is to have your solicitor say you will only proceed when retention is in place. What will follow next is that the sellers will evaluate the lenght of time it take to get this and expense and they will do either: Offer you a discount which gives you negotiating power as you know they are looking to sell soon or, they will threaten to withdraw from the sale and then you know a price reduction won't work.

Best of luck

istaunton

Thanks for the replies everyone. I've already started the process of informing the bank but I have no fear of needing to take the extension down as its there way to long for the council to be able to request it is removed (Nearly 40 Years).

And thanks PropertyGuy for answering the original question. I have already gone down the road of your suggestion

Cheers

adocholiday

When we were buying our house we had a similar issue. The bank refused to release the funds until the retention was secured. All we could do was try to assure the vendor that we were fully committed to the purchase and that once retention was granted we wouldn't mess about with prices or timelines. While that was going on we continued with all of the paperwork etc. that we could. It was a pain but ultimately we were left with no choice from the bank.

dubber

Did you get an opinion as to whether it falls under exempted development?

ArtyC

The bank will need a cert of compliance to release the funds , retention before sale is the only way .

We had a similar issue, we paid for the retention- was a gamble -- cost us over a year beside of dodgy engineer ( watch out for that - get info before hiring the first name you hear )

Happy out now we persevered but we had a very limited budget and didn't have many other options otherwise may have gone differently