We inspect a house – not a home

It’s an important difference – you’re busy working out who gets which bedroom, where your table is going and what colour to paint the kitchen. Your surveyor on the other hand has no emotional attachment to your chosen property and, when they inspect, are looking for cracks, damp, woodworm, poor alterations, insulation, defective windows, etc. They are your critical friend.

We’ll see things you won’t

Research shows that you will have spent around 38 minutes in total at the property and visited it twice before deciding to buy and that you are unlikely to go back until you own it.

By contrast a surveyor will spend several hours at a property looking at it objectively. They will go into places you didn’t when you visited! Most home buyers never look in the attic, some don’t spend anytime walking to the end of the garden and so on.

Our tip – meet your surveyor at the property, you get to see it a third time and the surveyor can show you what they’ve found.

We know what we are doing

Surveyors know what they are looking at and looking for – most home buyers don’t! Nice though your mate is (the one who does a bit of building and knows about buildings), he isn’t a surveyor, isn’t trained in forensic building investigations, or the causes of subsidence, wet rot and dry rot, etc. He is unlikely to have professional indemnity insurance and hasn’t spent five years training to be a Chartered Surveyor. And, because he’s your mate, he won’t be as objective as someone who’s independent.

You’ll save money in the long term

A proper building survey will save you money. Research by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) shows that 20% of buyers who did not have a survey later uncovered faults which cost, on average, £5,750 to remedy.

17% of new owners ended up paying more than £12,000 to make their homes habitable. A building survey will identify faults and remedial costs and enable you to make an informed decision and renegotiate the cost. Last year one of our surveys enabled a purchaser to reduce the asking price by £20,000 and have the most serious of the faults (a defective roof) remedied by the vendor before the purchase was complete!

You’ll make a properly informed decision

If you inform your surveyor of your plans, they’ll be well-placed to tell you how practical and feasible your proposals are – you would be amazed at the number of times we have to burst the bubble of a purchaser who was planning a loft conversion because the attic is simply not big enough!

If you are new to an area, a local surveyor will also local knowledge about possible developments, noise, the best areas of town, etc. that you might not have.