Massive differences in building survey quotes

imran22

I have been obtaining quotations for a building survey on a 3-bed house and the difference in price is huge. Lowest quote is £500 and highest £1200. All claim to be RICS members and have the details on RICS site. I am confused how to select one. Any suggestions?


Thank you for your help.

SuzieSue

There are 3 types of building survey. A lot of RICS surveyors will only offer the first 2 (basic and homebuyer's) as they will not have the insurance for a full structural survey so you need to be careful.

You should also look at this site if you are buying an older property:

https://www.istructe.org/finding-a-structural-engineer

SuzieSue

SuzieSue wrote: »

There are 3 types of building survey. A lot of RICS surveyors will only offer the first 2 (basic and homebuyer's) as they will not have the insurance for a full structural survey so you need to be careful.

You should also look at this site if you are buying an older property:

https://www.istructe.org/finding-a-structural-engineer

You should also ask to see their insurance if they are a sole trader or small partnership. We did that when the surveyor said he would only charge £500 for a full structural survey and he replied to say that we should find someone else to do our survey. We ended up using a structural engineer so we had a lucky escape.

Chanes

If it isn't too old or unusual a home buyers report usually is all that is needed I was told. £1200 seems to be a very expensive survey! We had a full building report for £700 on one property (waste of money a homebuyers report would have sufficed)

stator

The prices do vary a lot depending on what type of work the surveyor normally does and their experience. You might have a quote from someone who is an expert in a certain type of house/building and so he charges a lot, but you might not need his expertise.
A sole trader, surveyor working for himself might not be VAT registered if he doesn't do much work (semi-retired).
A multiple surveyor firm with office and staff etc the overheads are going to be a lot higher. In my experience the sole trader gave a better service than the office in terms of speed of service and quality of report.
As people have said above check the professional qualifications and professional indemnity insurance.
Unfortunately RICS allow surveyors to self describe their expertise. They should all be qualified in a general surveyor sense but they can say they are a structural surveyor or a building surveyor or whatever they like.
Try to find out how good their knowledge is of the type of house you are buying, if it's brick and block or stone and thatch or especially if it's an unusual type.