How can you avoid buying a home at risk of flooding?

19th January 2015 by

UK conveyancing solicitors cannot protect your home from flooding, but they can undertake an environmental search on your behalf.

Not only can the house purchase team at Healys perform a search on the legal aspects of your potential home, we can check whether there have been any previous issues with the land upon which the property is built. This would include flooding.

Contact us today to speak with an expert solicitor about the services we offer.

Want to undertake your own research?

It is always worth getting in touch with us for a thorough property and environment check prior to buying a home, however if you want to assess the flood risk to an area or specific property there are organisations which provide you with the tools to do this.

If the area you are interested in moving to is located in England or Wales, you can use the Environment Agency flood map to get an idea of whether any homes in that region could be at risk. The map shows areas which have the benefit of flood defences, and those that could be inundated by rivers or sea.

Likewise, if you are interested in an area of Scotland, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency has its own flood map you might wish to consult.

Although neither of these maps is entirely up to date, each provides good provisional indication of a region’s flood risk.

For a report on particular properties in England and Wales you can visit the Land Registry website and use itsflood risk indicator tool. This tool is more in-depth than the flood maps, however there can be information missing from the assessment.

Get in touch with professionals

Although the tools provided online for flood risk searches are useful, they do not always provide complete information. As well as this, these maps and assessments will not perform other important environmental or legal checks on your desired property.

For a full check of your potential home and the land upon which it resides, contact our expert UK conveyancing solicitors today.

You may tailor the services we offer to suite your requirements. For example, if you have already contacted a surveyor to investigate the structural soundness of the property, you might not want us to contact another on your behalf.

To see all of our contact details, click here.