Flood risk when buying a house: the five minute check before you make an offer

The seller does not have to volunteer it. The estate agent will not know. The lender finds out from the valuer after you have paid for the survey. The insurer finds out when you ask for a quote, usually the week before exchange. By then you have spent money and time. Five minutes before the offer saves all of that.

The five things to check

• The Flood Zone from rivers and the sea. 1 is low, 2 is medium, 3 is high. It ignores defences, so it is the cautious number.
• The surface water band. Rain with nowhere to go. This is the one that catches buyers on a hill, far from any river.
• Any live Environment Agency warning or alert near the address today. One warning is weather. A pattern is the river.
• The nearest river level gauges and what they read. A gauge near its record level in a dry week is worth a question.
• Insurance. Ask for a quote before you exchange, not after. If the premium is four figures or cover is refused, you want to know while you can still walk away.

Who has to tell you what

In England the seller answers the property information form, which asks whether the property has flooded. A seller must answer honestly, but a seller who has owned the house for two dry years may honestly know nothing. The Environment Agency records go back further than any owner's memory, which is why you read them yourself.

Flood Re, the thing most buyers have never heard of

Flood Re is a government backed reinsurance scheme under the Water Act 2014. It lets an insurer offer flood cover on a home at a capped premium set by council tax band, and it is designed to run until 2039. Whether a home qualifies turns on facts no map holds, mainly when it was built and how it is used, so no report can promise it. What a report can do is print the checklist, so you can tell in a minute whether it is worth asking an insurer about.

What to do with the answer

If everything comes back low, carry on. If something comes back high, do not walk away yet, because a Zone 3 house with good defences and Flood Re cover can be a perfectly ordinary purchase. Get the dated document, send it to your broker and your solicitor, get the insurance quote, and let the numbers decide. The free check on this site gives you the first three items above in seconds. The £12.99 report gives you all five, dated, with a source under every line, as a PDF you can forward.