Home buyer

Lauraaa12

How do you make the decision when buying a home as to which survey you should have done  I.e home buyers report or full structural?

pinkshoes

Depends how old the house is... (plus also how much money you have set aside to fix anything).

Having sold a 1970s build, the buyer paid over £1000 for a survey, and he just walked round looking at stuff for a couple of hours, then his report commented on the consumer unit being outdated (which as obvious when viewing) and a couple of other things that IMO were obvious when you looked round. He also made many comments about not being able to view stuff as furniture was in the way. Nor did he lift carpets.

On this basis, we did our own survey to save the £1000. The house was build early 1980s. The only thing we missed was that there was no thermostats on either the heating or hot water, but I don't think the surveyor would have picked these up easily either. We used a form we downloaded online showing us what to look for. We checked all taps worked, water ran hot, looked for signs of leaks, checked toilets flushed, switches worked etc... It took us about an hour to go through the check list.