Serious defects missed in Colleys Homebuyers report

moneyistooshorttomention wrote: »

Which represents a pretty decent hourly rate (which many of us would love to be paid) from where I'm standing.

Professional indemnity insurance would take a sizeable cut of fee income. Then there's an office to run. A £500 a year membership fee to pay........

Thrugelmir wrote: »

Professional indemnity insurance would take a sizeable cut of fee income. Then there's an office to run. A £500 a year membership fee to pay........

Insurance - accepted (no idea how much that is). Office to run? - chances are that they work from home anyway. Membership fee - accepted - but electricians (for instance) also have to pay a "membership fee" (membership of the NIC/EIC) and their hourly rate is high - but not as high as that would appear to be.

Wonders whether half of the idea of making such a charge is to say "We are professionals - careers and not jobs for us" after a comment on a news site the other day. The comment being that a builder was saying how they always turn up in suits (ie "Aren't I a professional?" in non-verbal language). When actually "rougher" clothes would be a sight more appropriate to inspecting a house. I thought that builder made a good point:cool:. I can, much more readily, picture someone in jeans walking through a muddy garden or kneeling down opening a manhole cover or something than someone in suits. Does sound like "I'm wearing a suit" should be interpreted as "Don't even ask me to do anything other than just take a quick look".

It's a common ploy to dress "too smart" for any more "menial" tasks one doesn't wish to do.

I think we'd all accept that level of charge - if we were "getting what we pay for" for it.

teneighty wrote: »

Back to the OP's question. This must be a very interesting and unusual case for 95% of the property to require demolition due to dry rot.

There is nowhere near enough information to comment whether the surveyor was negligent. Dry rot can be very difficult to identify sometimes with very little visible evidence on the surface but with a well established fungal growth hidden in the walls, floors etc. out of sight.

Given the firm involved was Colleys (owned by Lloyds Bank I believe), one of the large national chains I was moaning about, chances are the surveyor had 2 maybe even 3 Homebuyers to do that day as well as possibly 2 or 3 mortgage valuations and the same the next day and the day after that etc. etc. Is it any wonder that these cheap surveys are just generic tick box exercises with the resultant errors and omissions?

The good news is it is very easy to take the surveyor to task and claim compensation when they get it wrong. If more people went through the simple and free official complaints procedure I would hope that these firms would raise their standards, although in time that would probably lead to an increase in the cost of a survey.

Dry rot in a house may be something that's just happened to that particular house for no obvious reason anyone can think of - or it may be more of a "community" thing and a surveyor should be aware there was the possibility of it being there.

Friends of mine bought themselves a house in an area that everyone knows had a bad flood well within living memory. They subsequently found dry rot and managed to catch it early on and deal with it themselves and have lived in the house for decades since to present day.

Now, in their case, I would have thought any surveyor going would know how badly that area once flooded and be on the lookout specifically for that in that particular area (from his/her "local knowledge" they should have).

Wondering which of those two categories OP's house comes in (ie a one-off or a community problem that "local knowledge" thing a surveyor should know about).