How Damp Can Affect the Sale of Your Home

How Damp Can Affect the Sale of Your Home

By Ruth MacEachern

Product Manager

Buying or selling a home is one of the most stressful experiences most people will go through. It might seem like a constant stream of effort, choosing an estate agent, preparing the property, arranging viewings, and when you finally get an offer, you must go through the process of arranging a full survey that could stop the sale in its tracks.

When they visit your home to value it for sale, one of the key things that the surveyor will look for is damp. The presence of damp in a property can significantly affect its attractiveness to buyers. Depending on the type of damp present, repairs could be very costly, and may even cause the sale to fall through, leaving you back at the start of the journey. At the very least, the buyer or mortgage company may demand that repairs are completed before they release the funds.

Ways damp affects the sale and value of your home

If your house has visible signs of damp, it will become less attractive to potential buyers. The presence of mould on bathroom or kitchen walls is unattractive, and people will be immediately put off. Mould can be extremely damaging to the health of people with weaker immune systems including older adults and children, and as such mould is one of the things that may stop a potential buyer from proceeding.

Even if mould is not present, other signs of damp can also put a buyer off. Peeling paint or loose wallpaper will mean that the house might need to be fully redecorated before someone can move in, and this will incur a significant cost to them, meaning that they may not offer the asking price.

If damp is well established, and picked up in the valuation survey, a mortgage lender may require full repairs to be carried out before they will agree to lend money.  These repairs, particularly if they involve structural changes will be expensive, and delay the sale from taking place, meaning that even if you receive the asking price, you will have had a large bill.

A longer sale process, covering expensive repairs, or getting less money than you expected may mean that you miss out on finding a property that meets your needs. As such, it’s a good idea to address any potential damp issues in your home before you bring it to market.

Dealing with mould

The presence of mould on walls is an immediate turn off for many buyers, so cleaning any surface mould is essential. Fungicidal sprays or dilute bleach will kill off the mould and allow it to be wiped away. It’s important to wear eye and mouth protection when cleaning mould, and you should also wear old clothes in case the bleach damages them.

Of course, simply cleaning mould away won’t solve the underlying problem, and the mould could come back quickly if the damp remains.

What causes damp and how you can deal with it

There are three types of damp that are commonly found in homes.

Rising damp is caused by a fault in the damp proof course that runs around the bottom of your walls. Without an impermeable membrane to stop it, water can be drawn up through the walls where it creates dark stains and can cause plaster to crumble. If you have rising damp, you will need to get a builder to repair or replace the damp proof course layer and redecorate interior walls.

Penetrating damp occurs when there is a hole in the envelope of your home that is allowing water to get in. This may be a leaky roof, or a damaged window frame, or even a dripping pipe. Penetrating damp can damage walls quickly if a lot of water is involved, but repairs are normally quite straightforward once the source of the water is identified.

The final type of damp is condensation damp. This is caused when humid air meets a cold surface and the droplets of water that form soak into the underlying material such as plaster.

Condensation damp is often a sign of poor ventilation. Bathroom or kitchen extractor fans may not be removing saturated air quickly enough, or you may be drying clothes indoors and generating large amounts of water vapour. Improving the ventilation in your home with modern extractor fans or a whole house ventilation system such as PIV (positive input ventilation) will stop condensation permanently and remove the source of damp to get rid of the problem for good.

Find out more

If you are planning to sell your home and want to maximise the value, dealing with problems like condensation, damp, and mould before you go to market is a good idea. Book a free home survey from one of our local ventilation specialists. They will identify the cause of the problem and provide you with advice about the best way to deal with it.

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