Veranda Documentation: What to Have Ready Before You Sell

You've spent years enjoying your veranda. It's been a centrepiece of your garden, a place where you've had summer evenings with friends and winter mornings with coffee. It's added to your quality of life in a way that felt worth every penny. Now you're selling the house, and your solicitor has just told you that the buyer's surveyor has flagged the veranda as an issue. The buyers are asking questions. The chain is wobbling. And suddenly a structure you were proud of has become a complication you didn't see coming.

This scenario plays out more often than most people realise. At Roma Verandas, we hear about it fairly regularly — almost always from homeowners whose veranda was installed by someone else, and almost always at a moment when the timing couldn't be worse. This article explains exactly what surveyors look for, why verandas get flagged, and what you can do right now — whether you're planning an installation or already have one — to protect yourself.

What a Buyer's Surveyor Is Actually Looking For

When a buyer commissions a structural survey on a property — and any buyer getting a mortgage will have at least a basic survey, while many will commission a full building survey — the surveyor is looking for anything that represents a risk to the value or structural integrity of the property, or a future liability for the buyer.

A veranda sits in a category the surveyor will pay particular attention to: structures that are attached to the main building, that form part of the usable space of the property, or that are large enough to be considered a structural addition rather than garden furniture. The surveyor isn't necessarily looking to cause problems — they're doing their job, which is to give the buyer an accurate picture of what they're purchasing.

The questions they will ask, explicitly or implicitly, are these: Was this structure built with appropriate consents? Is there evidence it was built to a safe standard? Does the seller have documentation to confirm either of these things?

The Three Documents That Matter

If your veranda was properly installed, you should ideally be able to produce three categories of documentation: evidence of planning permission or confirmation that permitted development applied; a building regulations completion certificate if the structure required building regulations approval; and structural engineer calculations confirming the structure is adequate for its design loads.

In reality, many homeowners have none of these. This is not necessarily because anything went wrong with the installation — it's often because the installer never mentioned them, and the homeowner never knew to ask. Some installers deliberately avoid the subject because the documentation costs time and money, and some customers would choose a cheaper competitor if the full cost of compliant installation were transparent upfront.

The consequence of having no documentation is not that the veranda is automatically unsafe or illegal. It's that there is no evidence it isn't. And from a buyer's and their solicitor's perspective, the absence of evidence is itself a risk that needs to be managed.

How This Affects a House Sale

When a surveyor flags an undocumented structure, the buyer's solicitor will typically raise it as a requisition — a formal question the seller's solicitor must respond to. The seller has a few options at this point, none of which are entirely comfortable.

The first option is to obtain retrospective certification. This means commissioning a structural engineer to assess the veranda as built and produce a report confirming it is structurally adequate. If building regulations approval was required and not obtained, the seller may also need to apply for a regularisation certificate from the local authority — a process that involves a building control inspection and can take weeks. The costs of retrospective certification vary but can run to several hundred pounds, and the timescales can put pressure on a sale that has a completion date to meet.

The second option is to obtain indemnity insurance. This is a policy that protects the buyer against the financial consequences of any future enforcement action relating to the undocumented work. Indemnity insurance for undocumented structures is readily available from specialist insurers, and it's often the fastest solution when a sale is under time pressure. However, it is not a guarantee that everything is fine — it's an insurance policy against the risk that it might not be. Solicitors and buyers understand the difference, and some will be satisfied by an indemnity policy while others will push for actual certification.

The third option, and the one most sellers want to avoid, is negotiating a price reduction to reflect the uncertainty. In practice, this often means reducing the asking price by an amount the buyer considers adequate compensation for taking on the risk and the cost of dealing with the documentation issue themselves. That figure is entirely at the buyer's discretion, which means it can be significantly larger than the actual cost of rectifying the situation.

The Timing Problem

What makes all of this particularly stressful is that it tends to emerge mid-transaction, at a point when both parties have incurred legal costs, when the seller may be committed to buying another property, and when the chain is already under enough pressure. Dealing with a documentation issue at that moment is far harder — emotionally and practically — than dealing with it before you put the house on the market.

Our strong advice to anyone with a veranda already installed is to check your documentation now, not when you're about to sell. If you have a building regulations completion certificate, keep it safely with your property deeds. If you don't, get a structural engineer's assessment while there's no time pressure, and find out whether you need to make a retrospective building regulations application. The cost of doing this in calm water is a fraction of the cost of doing it in a panic.

What Roma Verandas Does Differently

We started talking about documentation and compliance with customers some time ago, not because it's an easy conversation, but because it's the right one to have. When we install a veranda, we're transparent from the beginning about what consents your project requires, what documentation we'll provide on completion, and what you should expect to have in your possession when we're done.

Where structural engineer calculations are appropriate, we commission them and provide you with a copy. Where building regulations apply, we help you navigate the approval process rather than hoping nobody notices. And we document our installations thoroughly — method statements, fixing specifications, product certifications — so that if a surveyor ever asks a question about your veranda, you have a complete, credible answer.

This approach costs us slightly more time and occasionally loses us a customer who chooses a cheaper quote from someone less scrupulous. We're comfortable with that. The customers who stay with us tend to be people who understand that a veranda is a long-term investment in their property, and that doing it properly is the only version that makes sense.

If you'd like to talk through your project — whether you're planning an installation or trying to understand what documentation you should have for an existing one — we'd be glad to help. There's no obligation, and straight answers don't cost anything.