What to actually ask before you buy (not after)
- Leonie and Steve - Harcourts Wellington
- 10 hours ago
- 3 min read
Seventeen years and 500+ Wellington sales in, and I still get surprised by what buyers don't know. Not because they're not smart. Nobody tells them. Their agent's too busy getting the deal across the line, and a lot of this stuff only ever comes up once... if you're unlucky enough to hit it.
So here's the rundown. What to actually ask about before you sign anything, not after.
1. The LIM
Everyone knows to get one. Far fewer know what to do with it once it turns up.
A LIM tells you what council knows. It does not tell you what the seller knows and never told council. See the gap?
Read it properly, not just the summary page. If something looks vague or half-explained, ask why. Council reports are written by council, not by someone trying to sell you the place.
2. The building report, and whose it is
Here's the one that catches people out. If the seller hands you a building report they organised themselves, and the inspector missed something, you've got no comeback. You didn't hire them. That report was never yours.
So who was it actually written for? Not you.
Get your own. Yes, it costs money. A few hundred dollars, against finding out after settlement that the deck was never consented and never has been.
3. Unconsented work
Wellington's full of it. Decks, garages, sleepouts, the lot. Half the time the seller genuinely doesn't know.
I've had a seller tell me "oh, I think I remember something about that when we bought the place in the eighties"... like that makes it fine now. It doesn't.
Ask directly. Get it in writing. Don't take "it's always been like that" as an answer.
4. Insurance, before you're attached
This is the one nobody thinks to ask about, and it's bitten more people than you'd think.
After the Christchurch quakes, some insurers stopped writing new policies in parts of the country altogether. Wellington got its own version of this after Kaikoura. For a while, in some pockets of this city, the only way to actually get cover was to take over the seller's existing policy with the same insurer. Not shop around. Not get three quotes. Just hope the seller's insurer would let you keep it going.
So there we'd be, ringing the vendor to ask who they were insured with, so we could pass it to the buyer, who then had to go and ask a company they'd never dealt with, "will you still cover this house if it's not your customer anymore?"
Nobody warns you that insurance can say no to a house before it says no to a person. So sort it before you're emotionally invested, not after you've already picked the paint colours.
The takeaway
None of this is exciting. That's exactly why people skip it, right up until it costs them.
LIM read properly. Your own building report. Unconsented work confirmed in writing. Insurance sorted before you commit.
Boring questions, asked early. What's that worth? Ask anyone who didn't ask them.
We walk every buyer through this properly. Whether you're looking in Khandallah, Newlands, Churton Park, Karori, Ngaio, Johnsonville, Wadestown or everywhere in between, if you want to know what you should actually be checking, give us a call.
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