Selling an Unmortgageable House in Stoke-on-Trent

There is a particular kind of stuck that only happens to some houses. You are not short of interest. You have had viewings, and you may have had offers. What you keep getting is the same phone call six weeks later: the buyer's mortgage was refused, and you are back at the start with another two months gone.

That is an unmortgageable house, and it is a different problem from a house that will not sell. The market wants it. Lenders will not fund it. This page explains what puts a house in that category, whether you have to fix it before you can sell, and what your options actually are. We buy houses in Stoke-on-Trent for cash, so we have an interest in this — the useful information comes first, and some of it points away from us.

What makes a house unmortgageable?

A house is unmortgageable when a lender's surveyor decides the property is not adequate security for the loan — meaning the lender is not confident it could sell the house on and get its money back. It is a judgment about the lender's risk, not a verdict on whether the house is a good home. The common causes in this city:

• Red ash floors. Solid floors laid over colliery waste, which can heave and break up over decades. This is the single most common cause of a refused mortgage in Stoke-on-Trent and barely exists elsewhere — see selling a house with red ash for what it is, how it is tested and what repair costs.
• Non-standard construction. Precast reinforced concrete and steel-frame houses, built in numbers here after the war. Most high-street lenders decline them outright — the detail is in selling a concrete house in Stoke-on-Trent and selling a BISF house in Stoke-on-Trent.
• Subsidence and mining ground. Recorded movement, or a coal mining report that raises questions a lender wants answered before it releases money — covered in selling a house with subsidence in Stoke-on-Trent.
• Short lease. Most lenders want a meaningful number of years left after the mortgage term ends. Below roughly eighty years a flat becomes hard to mortgage, and the shorter it gets the fewer lenders remain.
• Severe disrepair. No working kitchen or bathroom, an unsafe roof, active damp or fire damage. Lenders assess the house as it stands today, not as it would be after the work.
• Insurance. Quietly ends more sales than the rest. A house nobody will insure cannot be mortgaged, because the lender's security has to be insurable.

If more than one of those applies to your house, you are not in a worse category — you are in the same one. One refusal is as final as three.

Can you sell a house that lenders won't touch?

Yes. A cash buyer removes the lender from the transaction entirely, and with the lender goes the surveyor, the valuation condition and the six-week wait to find out. Unmortgageable is a statement about mortgage lending, not about ownership: the house can be bought and sold like any other, by anyone who is not borrowing against it.

That is the whole mechanism, and it is worth being clear about what it does and does not change. It does not make the underlying problem disappear — the red ash is still there, the lease is still short. It removes the party whose refusal was ending your sales.

Do I have to fix it before selling?

No, and whether you should is a genuine calculation rather than an obvious yes. Fixing the defect widens your market back to mortgage buyers, and a wider market usually means a higher price. Against that: you fund the work up front, out of your own money, before you see a penny of it back — and some of these problems cannot be fixed on a schedule. Red ash means lifting and relaying floors. A lease extension is a legal process with its own timetable. Subsidence may need a season of monitoring before anyone will certify anything.

The honest test is three questions. Can you fund the work without borrowing against a house nobody will lend on? Can you wait out the months it takes, including the wait for a buyer afterwards? And is the increase in price larger than what the work costs you? Where all three are yes, fixing it and selling on the open market will very likely put more money in your pocket than we will, and you should do that. Where any is no, you are choosing between selling as-is and staying put.

How fast can an unmortgageable house sell for cash?

Completion can follow in as little as a month. Without a lender there is no mortgage application, no lender's valuation and no underwriting — the timetable is set by the conveyancing and the searches rather than by a bank's queue.

For comparison, the open-market route on a house like this is rarely the twelve weeks the averages suggest. It is a viewing, an offer, a survey, a refusal, and then the same again with the next buyer. Sellers of unmortgageable houses do not usually lose one sale; they lose several in sequence, and each one costs them two months.

What will a cash buyer pay for an unmortgageable house?

Plainly, so there is nothing to discover at the end of a visit: we pay close to market value, not the full asking price — up to 95% of market value. That is the trade-off and it is the whole of it. In exchange, completion can follow in as little as a month, we pay your legal fees up to £400, there are no fees to us at any point and no viewings, and once you accept our confirmed offer we do not pull out — so the figure you agreed is the figure you get.

One thing worth saying, because sellers in this position expect the opposite. A refused mortgage does not mean your house is worth a fraction of its value. It means the pool of buyers narrowed to those not borrowing. The house is still a house on a street in Stoke-on-Trent where houses sell, and that is what its value is built from.

Why Stoke-on-Trent has more of these houses than most cities

This is not a national problem evenly spread. Stoke has a concentration of unmortgageable housing stock that comes directly from what the city used to do for a living.

The coalfield left two legacies: worked ground beneath a great many streets, and colliery waste that went into the floors of the houses built for the people who worked it. Red ash is a Stoke-on-Trent problem in a way it is not a Birmingham or a Bristol problem. Then came the post-war rebuilding — precast concrete and steel-frame estates put up quickly in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, entire streets of them, all now sitting outside what a standard mortgage will cover. A house can be sound, warm, well kept and lived in happily for sixty years, and still be a house no high-street lender will fund. In this city that describes a lot of houses, and the people who own them are usually the last to be told why their sale keeps collapsing.

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. If your sale has already collapsed once on a lender's decision, that number is the thing you have been missing — a figure you can actually plan around, instead of another two months of finding out.

Related

• We buy any house in Stoke-on-Trent — any condition, including houses no lender will touch.
• How the process works — every step from offer to completion, with the timings.
• Get my offer — see your figure before anyone contacts you.