Will your EPC rating affect your asking price?
Is simply having an EPC enough to achieve top money?
Firstly, let me explain the importance of an EPC, it’s a legal requirement to sell any property and each EPC is valid for 10 years.
Now with each EPC being valid for 10 years most agents and sellers will check if the property has one and use it as a tick box exercise, got a valid EPC, tick, nothing to worry about……Wrong.
With strong speculation that any buy to let property will require an EPC rating of C or above by 2025 there’s a lot of investors out there now searching for solely for properties that currently have an EPC rating of C or above, meaning anything rated D or below is simply getting ruled out straight away by a large bulk of investors.
An EPC rating can be affected by simple renovation work that you didn’t realise, for example changing the boiler or modernising the radiators, or insulating a roof or changing windows. So potentially you could be sat there with a “valid” EPC of below a C rating but the EPC could have been done 8/9 years ago and the works you’ve done would make an impact on this rating at which point it would be worthwhile investing in a new EPC to then attract interest from investment buyers searching for C rated or above.
To give you an example, I recently viewed a property with a friend that had an EPC rating of an E, something they had budgeted for to renovate, however upon speaking to the owner of the property (that happened to be outside once the viewing was done) they were able to explain that since they bought it, they’ve installed a new boiler, upgraded and insulated the roof and changed all the windows. All of which had been done and no thought had been made to getting a new EPC as their old one was still “valid”.
If you have any questions about EICR's, get in contact via the details below, I'd be more than happy to have a chat.