If a buyer pulled out after the survey, or an agent has told you the house is unmortgageable, you have most likely already lost months to a process that was never going to reach the end. That is worth saying plainly before anything else, because most of what follows only makes sense against it.
Unmortgageable is not worthless. It means the buyers have narrowed to the ones who are not borrowing. That group is smaller than the open market and it is entirely real — it is what a cash buyer is. What the house has lost is access to the mortgage market, which is not the same as its value.
What unmortgageable actually means
Somebody has probably used that word about your house — a surveyor, a lender, or an agent passing the message along. It is worth being precise about it, because it gets heard as a verdict on the house itself, which is not what it is.
It means a lender will not secure a loan against the property in its current state. That is a statement about lending policy. Lenders are cautious in specific and fairly predictable ways, and a house can fall outside what they will accept for reasons that have very little to do with whether it is a sound place to live.
What we buy
Not a diagnosis. It is here so you can find yours on it and stop wondering whether it puts you outside what we do.
- Structural movement, subsidence, or a history of underpinning
- Damp, dry rot or an infestation picked up in a survey
- A short lease, particularly once it falls towards eighty years
- Non-standard construction — concrete prefab, steel or timber frame, single-skin brick
- Japanese knotweed with no treatment plan behind it
- No building regulations sign-off for an extension, a loft or replacement windows
- Spray foam insulation in the roof, which has become a common one lately
- A title with something awkward on it — an absent co-owner, a missing document, an old covenant
Why a survey cannot end a sale to us
We are not borrowing to buy your house, so there is no lender to satisfy and no valuation that can come in under an agreed price. A survey is commissioned by a mortgage company to protect its own security. Take the mortgage out of the transaction and that step is not waived or overlooked — it is simply not part of it.
That is the difference between us and the buyer whose offer collapsed. Theirs was conditional on somebody else’s assessment of the building. Ours is not.
Nothing needs fixing first
No repairs, no clearing, no quotes to get in. Work done to make a house sellable is money spent moving it into a market you are already out of, paid for out of the same proceeds. Leave it as it is, including the parts you would rather nobody saw.
What we would still want to know
Only what affects who can sign and how long the legal side takes: freehold or leasehold and roughly how long the lease has left, who else is on the title, and whether anything is already in writing about the property. Paperwork saves time. Without it, we start anyway.
That is also where the one real limit sits. Condition is not the thing that stops a sale; the legal position can be. A title nobody can prove, or an owner who cannot be located, is solvable in some cases and genuinely not in others — and we would tell you which early rather than let it run for weeks.
What we will not do
We will not tell you how serious your problem is, what it would cost to put right, or what a surveyor would conclude. We buy houses; we do not survey them, and a cash buyer offering an opinion on your subsidence has an obvious interest in the answer. To know what is actually happening to the building, ask somebody you pay independently — a reasonable thing to want before selling to anyone.
What happens after you send the postcode
The sequence below is the same for every house we buy, and the dates are real ones counted from today. Read it against the one you have just been through: there is no viewing, no offer subject to survey, and no lender deciding at the end whether any of it stands.