Buying -- building survey.

[Newhere2]

Hello,

Just wondering what level of survey is the normal one chosen?

Also do you use the company recommended by your estate agent? It seems that you should use someone else or are they truly independent?

Should I do the survey prior to any legal work? I assume that is a yes.

Sorry for the questions if they are very basic, complete novice!!

For flats and modern houses a homebuyers survey is most common. For older houses a lot of people go for a full buildings survey, it gives a more comprehensive list of all the problems (they always find problems, you have to judge if they are dealbreakers or not).

You should be looking for a surveyor and a solicitor at the same time really, you shouldn't do the survey first unless you think there's a high chance of it being so bad you stop the purchase. Otherwise if you do them in tandem your lawyer can start talking to the other side to get things moving on draft contracts etc, it speeds things up.

Personally I wouldn't go with the surveyor recommended by the agent, I can only see disadvantages in that (likely to be more expensive, possibly not independent although they should be). Going with the one recommended by your mortgage company is fine though, otherwise a personal recommendation is your best bet. Try to find a local surveyor who has experience with the type of property you're buying.

Homebuyers is most common. If you have a mortgage you will need a valuation at least and can pay a few extra pounds to upgrade this if you wish. Do this in tandem with your legal work – one doesn’t wait for the other.

thanks for the help :)

Worth asking surveyor what the price difference is between a homebuyers and building survey is. For us, it was £90 and we thought it was worth paying as a building survey tells yo u not just what's wrong but how to fix it and how much it would cost.

I wouldn't use the lender's surveyor for a homebuyer's report again. If they do a "drive by" valuation it's fine. If the same person also does a more detailed report they will tell the lender about any problems they find, and you may end up with a retention on your mortgage. Even though you are paying them to do the survey on your behalf.

With our place we already knew what most of the problems were, but because the surveyor passed on information the lender wouldn't otherwise have had, we ended up with a £20k retention. This meant we had to stump up an extra £20k in cash to buy the place and couldn't afford to do the work we'd already budgeted for, because the lender wouldn't release the money until we could show we'd done the work. Which we couldn't, because they'd made us hand all our remaining money over to the vendor...

Just pick one at random out of the yellow pages or something. They're all pretty much equally useless anyway.

thanks everyone

Spot on cheese- we had a retention on our mortgage in the past when we used the lender's surveyor. We wised up this time. We're buying a house in a worse condition and the mortgage offer came back just fine as the lenders only did a basic valuation.