Should I claim on the insurance first or sell the house as it stands?

Either is possible and the right answer depends on your policy and your circumstances, so ask your insurer and your solicitor before committing. Reinstating first returns the house to the open market but means living with the insurer's timetable. Selling as it stands ends that timetable but raises questions about how the claim is settled or assigned.

Does fire repair work need building regulations approval?

It often does. GOV.UK lists work that may need approval, including replacing fuse boxes and connected electrics, replacing roof coverings, installing or replacing a heating system, and replacing windows and doors. GOV.UK warns that without approval you will not have the certificates of compliance you may need when you want to sell your home.

Sell a Fire-Damaged House in Stoke-on-Trent

Yes, you can sell a fire-damaged house, and you can sell it at any stage of the insurance process — before you claim, during the claim, or after a settlement. Nothing about the damage stops the sale. The obstacle is the mortgage lender, because an ordinary buyer's lender will not lend on a house until it has been put back.

We buy houses across Stoke-on-Trent and Newcastle-under-Lyme with our own money, fire-damaged ones included, so we have an interest in you reading on. What follows is general information about how a fire-damaged sale works — not legal advice, not insurance advice, and not a survey of your house. Where a fact below is checkable, it is sourced and dated. Where it is not, this page says so rather than inventing a number.

Can I sell a house with fire damage?

Yes. A fire-damaged house can be sold exactly like any other house — the damage changes who will buy it, not whether it can be bought. Ownership is unaffected, the title is unaffected, and there is no stage of an insurance claim at which the house stops being yours to sell.

What narrows is the buyer pool. Once a house needs structural or services work before it is habitable, the people who can buy it are the people who are not borrowing against it: cash buyers, builders and developers. That is a smaller market than the open one, and the price reflects both the work and the uncertainty the next owner takes on. That is the honest shape of it, and everything below is detail on those two points.

It also means the timetable is yours to choose rather than the insurer's. A great many people in this position assume they have to see the claim through to reinstatement before they are allowed to move on. They do not.

Can you get a mortgage on a fire-damaged house?

Not until it has been reinstated, in almost every case. A mortgage is secured on the property, so the lender's valuer is asked whether the house is adequate security for the loan as it stands today — not as it will be after the builders have finished. A house with fire damage to its structure, roof, or electrics does not pass that test, and the lender declines or holds the money back.

This is the same wall that meets every owner of an unmortgageable house, whatever put them there. It is worth understanding what it does and does not mean. It is not a judgment about the house's future or about you. It is a statement that the lender cannot size its risk today, and one lender's refusal usually predicts the next one's.

The practical consequence for a seller is the part that hurts: you can find a keen buyer, agree a price, and lose them six weeks later when their lender's surveyor visits. On a fire-damaged house that can happen more than once, and each cycle costs a month or more.

Should I claim on the insurance first, or sell as it stands?

Either is possible, and which is better depends on facts only you and your insurer know. This is genuinely a decision for you with your insurer and your solicitor — a web page cannot make it, and this one is not going to pretend otherwise. What follows is the shape of the choice, not a recommendation.

Reinstating first means the house goes back on the open market as an ordinary house, at an ordinary price. It also means living with the claim: the insurer's timetable, its loss adjuster, its choice of contractor, and the gap between what the policy pays and what the job costs. If the house is empty while the work runs, check your policy's position on unoccupied property before you rely on cover being in place — unoccupancy conditions are common and they are the sort of thing that is discovered too late.

Selling as it stands ends the timetable. It also raises questions about the claim itself: whether a claim can be assigned to a buyer, whether it must be settled before completion, and how any settlement money is treated on the sale. Those are matters for your insurer and your solicitor, and the answer depends on your policy wording. Ask both before you commit to either route — the answer shapes the price you should accept.

There is one part of reinstatement worth knowing before you decide, because it outlives the fire. Fire repairs run straight through work that needs building regulations approval. GOV.UK lists the alteration work that may need it, and the list reads like a fire-repair schedule: "replace fuse boxes and connected electrics", "change electrics near a bath or shower", "replace roof coverings on pitched and flat roofs", "install or replace a heating system", "add extra radiators to a heating system", and "replace windows and doors". Its warning to homeowners is direct: "Without approval you will not have the certificates of compliance you may need when you want to sell your home." (Source: GOV.UK — Building regulations approval, checked 1 September 2026.)

That is the trap in a badly run reinstatement. A house repaired without the paperwork can end up harder to sell than the same house repaired properly and more slowly — and the problem surfaces years later, at a buyer's solicitor, when you have long since spent the settlement.

What is a fire-damaged house worth?

It varies with the extent of the damage, and anyone quoting you a percentage off a web page is guessing. Smoke damage to one room and a gutted roof structure are not the same problem, do not cost the same to put right, and cannot carry the same number.

What is more useful than a made-up figure is the shape of the decision:

Reinstate, then sell on the open market. The best price if the work goes well and the paperwork is right. You carry the claim, the timetable and any shortfall between the settlement and the real cost.
Sell as it stands to a cash buyer. No lender in the transaction, so no valuation condition can end it. You will not get what the same house would fetch repaired — that is the trade, and it is the whole of it.
Auction. Fast and certain in timing. You pay fees and you take what the room does on the day.

We do not put a price on a fire-damaged house from a form, and we would not trust one that did. Our online tool prices your house against recorded sales near your postcode, which tells you what the house is worth in ordinary condition — a real and useful starting point, and the number the damage is discounted from. The figure for the house as it actually stands is agreed at the visit, once someone has seen it. Up to 95% of market value is what we work to, the "up to" doing real work on a page like this one: on a damaged house that percentage is read against the house as it stands, not against the repaired one.

Do I have to tell buyers about a past fire?

Yes — and getting this right protects you, not the buyer. Your solicitor prepares the property information forms that go to the buyer's side, and they ask about the house's history and condition. Answer them accurately and completely, attach what you have, and the sale is clean. A buyer who can later show you knew something material and did not disclose it has a route back to you, and that risk outlasts the completion date by years.

Being straightforward here is also commercially sensible, which sellers in this position often do not expect. A documented fire with a documented, signed-off repair is a known quantity. A fire the buyer's surveyor discovers for themselves is an unknown one, and unknowns are what kill sales and knock money off prices.

Keep everything: the claim reference and correspondence, the loss adjuster's reports, contractor invoices and specifications, electrical certificates, and any building regulations completion certificate. It is a file that is tedious to assemble and very hard to reconstruct later. Your solicitor will tell you how to answer for your particular situation — that judgment is theirs and yours, not ours and not a web page's.

How fast can a cash sale complete on a fire-damaged house?

Completion can follow in as little as a month, because the two things that usually set the pace are not in the transaction. There is no mortgage application and no lender's valuation, so there is no surveyor whose opinion of a damaged house can end the purchase six weeks in.

Set that against an open-market sale, which in ordinary conditions takes four to eight months when nothing goes wrong — and fire damage is precisely the thing that goes wrong, usually more than once, before anyone explains why. If the damage is cosmetic, the house is otherwise straightforward and you can wait out the claim, an estate agent will very likely put more money in your pocket than we will. If a buyer's lender has already walked away, or you are carrying a mortgage on a house you cannot live in while an insurer takes its time, this is the honest comparison.

We pay close to market value, pay your legal fees up to £400, charge no fees of our own, and do not pull out once you accept a confirmed offer — which on a house with visible damage is the promise that actually matters, because a price that gets renegotiated after the survey is the standard experience of selling one.

Our valuation tool shows you the figure first, built from recorded sales near your postcode, before anyone contacts you. It takes under a minute and there is no obligation at any stage.

Selling an unmortgageable house in Stoke-on-Trent — every reason a lender says no, and every option when one does.