Aren't Estate Agents supposed to let you know, by law, if there are problems where you buy your house ?

I would've thought so but of course the big problem is that the estate agent is (effectively) employed by the seller.

What we need is a service that works on behalf of the buyer and so is accountable to the buyer.

As I mentioned on the previous page there is a pre-contract enquiry form that the seller MUST complete truthfully, so if they have any disputes with neighbours they have to disclose it at that point, if they don't then you can sue them afterwards.

As the Aardvark Lawman pointed out though, you only find that out after you've bought the house and even though you MIGHT be able to recover some money from the seller (if they have any ready cash to give you) its a legal process that will cost you and then you'll still have bad neighbours, you also have to be in the legal process (ie proceeding to contract) before all of these searches are carried out so if you decide to back out when you get the form back then you'll still have spent some money with your solicitor although it won't be an awful lot, believe it or not the solicitor is the lowest paid element in your house move.

That's the job of the Buyer's solicitor.

Make sure that the neighbours are owner occupiers if possible. The guy who bought the house next door to us decided to rent his house out and he seems to have a never ending supply of nutters and weirdos. Stories to tell there!

That's a laugh. Just moved house, "Have you ever had any problems with the drains" - "Not to our knowledge" was the answer on that particualr questionnaire. After our first use of the bath the downstairs toilet flooded - the foul pipe from the front of the house to the drain under the drive was blocked with tree roots - completely. After getting that cleared out we then had sewage start appearing in the back garden from the rear drain. After having the main drain surveyed with a camera the pipe to the main sewer had collapsed - and was half blocked - and it hadn't just happened either. We were very lucky because recent legislation makes your water company responsible for any of your pipes once they leave your property. The main sewer hub was in our neighbours front drive and the pipe had collapsed just before joining it. Our introduction the the pensioner next door was "hello, we just moved in and Wessex water are going to have dig a 3 metre deep trench in your front garden".
In the end we had all the money we had spent re-imbursed by Wessex Water (and very quickly), they also replaced the pipe and cleared up the old boys garden pretty well.

Going through other sections on that form though and there are some things we will be sending letters to our solicitor about - subsidence and flooding to name but two, which they have clearly lied through their bumholes about.

The problem with that form is that it offers the option of "not known". There is no way they could not have known about the drains as they were completely blocked (and the neighbour told us they were out regualrly rodding them).

You can look forward to spending more money with your solicitor then

I'm just glad that you didn't have those forms in the 1990s when we sold one of our houses (we've moved eight times so far, would have been cheaper being gypsies), "Does your house sit right on top of an underground stream" would have been answered as "Possibly" and "Does the water ever gather in your ground floor void to a depth of several feet and almost come through the floorboards after several days rain" would have been "Its feasible", after several days rain we had the hidden hatch in the kitchen cupboard open permanently watching the water table rise until it was time to get the Hippo pump out again.

This.

Once had the misfortune to have someone move into the stone terrace next door then decide to let it out. He first decided to strip all the plaster off the walls and put in wooden stairs and remove all the carpets to make "a stone terrace with a twist". The result was that if someone in it so much as broke wind you heard every detail as there were no soft furnishings or plaster to absorb or muffle the sound.

We then had a succession of young lads or young couples move in over 6 month intervals. We heard all the rows, all the makeup sex, all the practicing on musical instruments, all the heavy bass at parties, all the TV and every single movement. I'm amazed we managed to sell!

Never buy a house from anyone involved in the building trade.

Oh I saw a cracking example of this many years ago, an old couple selling the house that they had bought from new 30 years previously, more than that he had been a joiner and had worked on every house on the estate, I have to say in his favour that he bought one of the better positioned ones though. The poor old sod had terminal heart desease and could barely walk five yards but he propped himself up and showed us around his house which was obviously his pride and joy.

As were all of the cupboards and secret hidey-holes that he had built into the cavity walls over the years, he literally went around touching parts of what looked like walls only to have a hatch spring open and a space the depth of the internal partition wall be revealed, with great pride from him, the fact that you couldn't put anything in these three inch deep cupboards seemed to have passed him by - there were hundreds of them in the house, at one point he showed us the standard Woolworths medicine cabinet in the bathroom, then he pressed something and it unhinged itself from the wall and swung open to reveal another cavity wall cupboard behind it, "Its where I keep me meds" he said, as if his heart medicine was top secret or something.

We didn't buy the house.