Surveys: what an inspection can and cannot tell you

The most important distinction comes first, because it is the one most often missed. If you are borrowing, the lender will carry out a valuation. That valuation exists to answer one question: if the borrower stops paying, can the lender recover the loan by selling the property? It is not commissioned by you, it is frequently not shown to you in full, and in a great many cases nobody goes inside the house. A buyer who relies on it has had no independent examination of the building at all.

A survey is a separate instruction, paid for by you, in which a surveyor inspects the property and reports on its condition. What they can do is look — thoroughly, with experience, at everything visible and reachable. What they cannot do is lift floors, open walls, move heavy furniture, or inspect what is behind a locked hatch or under a fitted carpet. Reports are explicit about this, and the caveats are not evasions: they mark the real boundary of what an inspection establishes.

Choosing a level

The level of survey should follow the building, not the price of the house. A recently built flat with no alterations rarely needs the fullest level of inspection. A Victorian terrace with a rear addition, a replaced roof covering, a converted loft and a history of unknown work needs it badly. Broadly: newer and unaltered can take the lighter levels; older, extended, altered, timber-framed, listed, or unusual in construction warrants the full building survey.

It is also worth commissioning early. A report that arrives after the mortgage offer and a month of legal work has cost you the negotiating position it might otherwise have created, and it puts you in the worst possible frame of mind for reading it.

What tends to come up locally

The town's stock produces a recognisable set of findings. In the older centre: solid walls without cavities, which behave differently from modern construction and are unforgiving of the wrong repairs; historic movement, usually long since settled but always worth distinguishing from current movement; roof coverings at the end of a long life; and the accumulated consequences of a century of well-meant alterations.

In the late-Victorian and Edwardian terraces of the hill streets: rear additions with shallow foundations, the usual questions about damp at the base of solid walls, and drainage shared between properties in ways that are not always documented. In interwar and post-war stock: original flat roofs on extensions, first-generation cavity insulation, and windows and heating systems at replacement age. Near the river, on either bank: ground conditions and flood exposure, which are matters for the mapping as well as the surveyor.

None of this is a reason not to buy anything. Every house has a list. The point of the report is to convert unknown risk into a known list with a rough order of cost and urgency attached.

Reading the report

Surveyors write defensively, and a report read cold is frightening. The way to read it is by category. First, anything described as requiring urgent attention or further investigation before commitment — this is the short list that actually matters, and it is the list on which a specialist report or a renegotiation is founded. Second, defects that are real but ordinary, which belong in a maintenance budget with dates against them. Third, the large body of observations and caveats that mean the surveyor saw the thing and is telling you it exists.

If a report recommends a specialist investigation, that recommendation is not a formality. A general surveyor identifying possible movement, or possible damp with an unclear cause, is telling you that the question is outside what a visual inspection can settle, and the answer will change what the house is worth to you.

What to do with the findings

A survey producing a list of ordinary maintenance items has done its job and changes nothing about the transaction. A survey producing a significant unexpected finding gives you three options: proceed as agreed, proceed on renegotiated terms, or withdraw. Which is right depends entirely on the finding, the building and your own tolerance for work, and no general rule is worth much here. What is worth stating is that the survey is the last point in the process where new information about the building arrives cheaply. After completion, everything it might have told you becomes yours.