Everything You Need To Know About BISF Houses

Whether you’re in the market for a property you have questions about or you’re thinking about selling one yourself, we’re here to help.

As with all non-standard construction properties, BISF houses come with a whole host of baggage, so it’s important to know where you stand before launching into a transaction either way.

In this guide, we’ll take you through everything you need to know about BISF houses, from getting a mortgage to making a quick sale, so let’s get to it.

Table of Contents

• What is a BISF house?

• What to look out for on a BISF house

• Can you get a mortgage on a BISF house?

• The pros and cons of a BISF house

• What is the best way to sell a BISF house?

What is a BISF house?

BISF stands for British Iron and Steel Federation—the term BISF house describes a kind of property that was built with a steel frame in the UK in the immediate aftermath of World War II, although not all steel-framed houses are BISF houses. 

Around 35,000 BISF homes were built across the country, according to Structherm, as a solution to the housing shortage—they were designed to address the need to house people quickly, so they were rather hastily built between 1944 and 1950. 

Read more: Find Out When Your House was Built

BISF houses are prefabricated properties that carry a bit of a reputation because of their ‘flatpack’ nature—they were speedily assembled using the factories that were in operation during the war, so they were built with steel frames, galvanised metal sheets and sometimes concrete to fast-track construction. 

As a result of the focus on urgency, the speed at which these prefab houses were built meant that little attention was paid to other aspects of modern housing, such as insulation and noise proofing, so they get a bad rep for a reason—this makes them troublesome to insure and often difficult to sell to mortgage-reliant buyers.

What to look out for on a BISF house

Some of the key visual identifiers of BISF houses include:

1. Render around the ground floor

2. Metal sheet cladding around the first floor

3. Possibly as a pair of semi-detached houses

4. Metal flue pipe and cowling on the roof

Image credit: NSH

As for the internal construction, you will need to check the history of the house to be sure it’s a BISF property, but the era in which it was built will be a dead giveaway of this. Most BISF houses look like this from the outside:

The frame will include supports that are bolted to the concrete foundation underneath, which will include a small brick wall of at least nine inches to support the frame. You can get a very detailed description of the construction of a BISF house from the Non-Standard House Construction website—here’s an excerpt of it:

The frame will have been made up of a kit of parts, each of which was individually numbered and put together like a piece of modern Scandinavian furniture. These premanufactured kits, transported across the country by train, were precisely what made the construction of BISF houses so rapid.

Can you get a mortgage on a BISF house?

Yes, you can get a mortgage on a BISF property, but they can prove challenging for some buyers because they are a riskier prospect for lenders. Since they appeared on the Housing Defects Act 1984, which was repealed and replaced by the Housing Act 1985, they have endured a stigma, not as a defective property as such, but as a property that’s prone to problems like asbestos, corrosion to the steel frame and ineffective energy performance due to a lack of thermal insulation.

BISF houses are a form of non-standard construction in the UK, which makes them a little more like a red flag to lenders than most, but there are things you can do as a seller or a buyer to make it more likely to push a BISF house through to completion—here are a couple of tips to help you: 

While it may be more difficult to obtain a mortgage on a BISF property, it’s certainly not impossible. The same goes for selling, too, as it can be a tough sell on the open market, but selling to a cash buyer like The Property Buying Company means you won’t have to wait for a lender to give the green light—we can buy straight away, no matter the condition or location. Enter your postcode below to get a free cash offer on your BISF house today.

The pros and cons of a BISF house

They might get a bad rep, but not all BISF houses come with bad news. Just as there are cons, there are pros to owning one in 21st-century Britain.

Many buyers are on the lookout for a project to work on, so they are not averse to taking a risk from a financial standpoint—BISF houses can be attractive to these kinds of people, even if the pool of buyers will be typically much smaller than with most other houses.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of BISF houses so you can make a more informed decision on your next move:

What is the best way to sell a BISF house?

If you are the owner of a BISF house and are concerned about being able to sell it on, worry not. There are options available to you, even if it seems like a daunting prospect.

You can still sell on the open market as long as you prepare the house as well as you can, e.g. by investing in the reinforcement mentioned earlier. Granted, the pool of interested buyers will be smaller, but those who are looking for BISF houses specifically will be fully aware of the issues that come with them. 

That does also mean that they’ll be aware of the wiggle room that allows them on the negotiation front, so be prepared to haggle with some traditional buyers.

The biggest hurdle you’ll come across with a prospective buyer via this route will be them obtaining a mortgage if they are not a cash buyer. For all the reasons mentioned above, lenders can be reluctant to offer buyers a mortgage on BISF properties, but, according to the OnlineMortgageAdvisor, almost half of lenders are willing to offer such deals:

You might get lucky and find a cash buyer on the open market, but these can often take a while. Another route forward is to sell to a cash buyer like us, where our cash reserves allow us to act immediately—you don’t need to wait around for months to sell.

We have bought many BISF houses over the years and we can do the same for you—we can buy in as little as a week, but we can also work to your timeline and agree a path to completion that’s best for you. All you have to do to get started is enter your on our get your offer page.