If you have commissioned a Building Survey then you can request this. We can only offer this by prior arrangement as we have to make sure the vendor is content for this to happen — sometimes they say no — and we also ask for payment before the survey. Please ask when you book your survey. We will give you a time to meet us, which will usually be towards the end of our survey. Any earlier and we won’t be able to tell you anything substantive — please note that we cannot do our job properly if you stay for the whole inspection as it is distracting and prevents us from giving you the best service. We find that usually around 20 minutes is enough for us to explain our findings to you.

The length of time the inspection takes is dependent on the size of the property and the extent of any defects that may be identified. For guidance, an inspection of a typical three-bedroom house in reasonable order may take several hours. Larger properties and properties with multiple defects will take more time. For very big houses two surveyors may work together.

We try, wherever possible, to dispatch our report a day or so after the inspection. Building surveys in particular are often 40 or 50 pages long and are all individually written so this takes time. If required, a brief verbal report can be made available upon receipt of payment.

We are confident in our abilities.

However, our surveys do have ‘get out’ clauses, but we do not hide behind them. Our surveys are always definitive. Basically, we’ll report on what we can see and not on what we can’t. We can’t guess, but we can give a considered opinion.

Our small print will be written clearly, is easy to understand and we stick by our quoted fee.

Check our Survey Terms and Conditions.

Absolutely not! A mortgage valuation is just that, a valuation of the property commissioned by your mortgage or loan lender, and written purely for their benefit to assess the risk of their loan against the resale value of the property.
A survey is written for you as the prospective buyer (or home owner), to give you the best possible assessment of the property’s condition, required repairs and maintenance, etc.