To survey or not to survey...

daisiegg

Hi all...me again!

We are proceeding with our house purchase (yay!) and the next item on the to-do list was to arrange the survey.

I did a bit of research and I think the advice is that we get a homebuyer's report rather than a building survey; the house is 15 years old, is an ordinary house in what looks like very good condition.

I went online and got a few quotes, looks like it will cost about £500 - fine, I think we'd budgeted up to £1000 for it so that's great.

However, one of the quotes came to me with an attached PDF of an example of a homebuyer's report. I read it and .....I just can't see how it's worth the money.

It basically seems to say that the surveyor will just kind of have a bit of a look...they won't move carpets or furniture or look behind or inside anything, they won't get up on a ladder to look at the roof or anything, they will look at what is visible of the heating/hot water system but they won't test it or anything....what are we actually paying £500 for?!

We've had the mortgage valuation report from our lender and it details what the house is madeof, etc, that the mains services are available, and says that the house appears to be in good condition with minimal wear and tear.

What more is the surveyor going to tell us?

Obviously, we don't want to take any risks and end up having problems in the future because we wanted to save £500. But could someone please explain to me why it is important to get this survey done, and what the surveyor is actually going to do and going to tell me? Because from what I can see from the sample report, s/he is just going to wander around and look at things. Well, we did that when we viewed the house!

What can the surveyor see from 'just looking at things' that we couldn't see? (I mean that as a genuine question - I know nothing about this)

I'm sure I'm over-simplifying things and I know everyone always says you must, must, must, must get a survey done. Please could someone explain to me why it is so important in my situation?

Thank you in advance

KateLiana27

We got a homebuyer's report for £376 (this included the £180 valuation required by our bank, so we only paid £200 odd to upgrade). Report was 27 pages long. You're right in that a lot of it was stating the obvious and a lot of backside-covering. However there was also a huge amount of very useful information, covering everything from the roof tiles, structural movement, to the dampproof course, giving his opinion (from his experience) on what was acceptable in a house of that age and what was not. It was worth every penny.

You're basically paying for an experienced and knowledgeable (hopefully) professional to cast their expert eye over things and see the things you can't. I would say that everyone needs AT LEAST a homebuyer's. A full structural is never a bad thing if you can afford it, and will go into more depth. However you would probably get away with a homebuyer's in the property you've described, provided it hasn't had extensive building work (eg extensions) done to it. Another advantage of a homebuyer's is that it's set out in an easy-to-read, idiot-proof format that gives everything a condition rating of 1 to 3 depending on how bad it is.

Bear in mind that surveyors are like GPs - they can identify problems but don't specialise in all of them, so if an issue is identified you may well be advised to call in an expert (eg damp, timber, drains etc). This will be the case with a full structural, not just a homebuyer's, so expect this.

phoebe1989seb

I would like to add that surveyors can also make stupid mistakes........

When selling our house a couple of months back our buyers arranged to have a Homebuyers Report carried out. Our old house was a reasonably well-sized 1600 sq ft Tudor house (unlisted!) that had been moved to the current site in the 1930s. The surveyor seemed pretty thorough - he was there for around three and a half hours and did all the usual stuff - photographing the roof etc etc, but when our buyers came back to us to discuss his findings it seemed as though he had surveyed a completely different house. He described the new water cylinder as an old asbestos one, yet completely missed the asbestos that was there is the ceiling of an attached outbuilding! He said that the chimney stacks needed repointing - when they had clearly been done recently (by the previous owners' builder 4 years ago) and announced that there was a woodworm infestation because he discovered approximately three holes in an attic - my DH later confirmed this with our buyers! Yet he made no mention of some loose/broken terracotta roof tiles or a hole in a cast-iron down-pipe And so the list of errors went on.........to the point where we thought he'd got our house's report mixed up with another one!

So whilst I would strongly recommend that you get a surveyor to check the place out, remember to go through it very carefully and take some of what they say with a large pinch of salt!!!

Phoebe x

FireWyrm

Yikes! £500 for a homebuyers report! You could get a full structural for that. My advice is to get a few more quotes.

Blodwen

FireWyrm wrote: »

Yikes! £500 for a homebuyers report! You could get a full structural for that. My advice is to get a few more quotes.

Would definitely agree with this - we had a homebuyers done on the previous place we were going to buy and it cost £210, whilst the full structural on the one we're buying now cost £540. The homebuyers was pretty comprehensive and we would've had the same on the new house, but the age of it precludes that.

I would say that the amount of time and work that goes into them varies massively though- when our buyer had a homebuyers done on our house the surveyor was there for about 1.5 hours and seemed to do a relatively thorough job, whilst our full structural took half a day by all accounts. In contrast, a friend's buyer had a structural survey done and the surveyor was only there for 45 mins :eek: If you could get a recommendation it would help, and since you've already had the valuation done it would be your choice of surveyor rather than going through your lender.