Anyone had a bad experience with party wall surveyors?

[MGMidget]

We used party wall surveyors a few times now (both as building owner and as adjoining owner). I have always found their awards pretty useless (often containing important typos or ambiguously-worded, just generally very slap-dash). We have had issues develop with a couple of sets of work involving surveyors and I have found that in each case the inadequacy of the drafting of the award/records of condition etc render the awards completely useless and cause dispute and confusion.

I have also seen some shocking behaviour from surveyors which seems contrary to the general principles of the party wall act and their role which is supposed to be impartial.

I wondered if I am alone or are there lots of us with bad experiences with party wall surveyors?

When we next move house my DH really wants a detached property so we never (he hopes) have to have any dealings with a party wall surveyor again!

Maybe sure it's far away from the next property. If it's within I think it's one or two meters, the party wall thing can still apply!

That was one of my key requirements when looking for our next house ( it took two years ). That any work we did on it, it could be done without any agreements or having to use neighbours land/ access . It’s just to much of a faff if you get awkward neighbours.

We found a detached with garden all around and about 75% of the boundaries are ours, so result !!!!!!!!

Steve the Party Wall Surveyor (and RICS Chartered Surveyor) here - even us party wall surveyors have trouble with party wall surveyors! It can sometimes be like the wildwest but that's the trouble with an unregulated profession with no qualification requirement.

Steve, yes. I have seen the wild west of party wall surveyors.

I think some surveyors deliberately make awards ambiguous to provide fertile ground for a nice expensive subsequent dispute that they can charge further fees for. And there seems to be no recourse to sue them for negligence either - they seem to be immune but there is no oversight of them! Even judges are accountable!

The RICS seems to have taken steps to now regulate its surveyors party wall activities but you cant stop your neighbour from appointing an non-RICS surveyor with no accountability to anyone!

As a matter of interest, what do you do if you are appointed on a job where the neighbour’s surveyor has a bit of a reputation in the industry for being combative or just lacking knowledge of the party wall act and difficult to deal with? All this increases costs and third surveyors arent necessarily a pillar of knowledge, impartiality and respectability! We had one ‘appointed’ (not selected as there was only one name to choose) by a local authority. The third surveyor clearly knew very little about the party wall act or what he should be doing. He was a relative of one of the building control officers and that seemed to be how his name was put forward!

When I was in sixth form one of my classmates was running a party wall surveyors on the side. He bought a degree from the University of Cairo IIRC and got enough business to start to employ 'real' surveyors. He carried on running the business whilst completing his actual degree at Oxbridge, but the business got blacklisted by, I don't know, some sort of regulator and I don't think he's doing it any more. But for a time he was absolutely raking it in, at a scarily young age, for what I saw even at the time as scamming people. Just to demonstrate the mention upthread of the Wild West.

Very many of the wilder west surveyors are well know so when you find they are acting for a neighbour it's tin hats on and be ready for a pointless tussle.

I will always start by asking for an anticipated fee and setting my expectation of costs at the outset. We then need to be careful to keep within the Act, one tactic is to try and pull in unrelated elements. Its usually hard work. And they will always end up with a fee that is £350 more than a reasonably expected figure - just enough to be worthwhile and not enough to necessarily warrant an extended dispute. I will sometimes try and agree an award without all or some of the fee in it as it is terrible practice to hold up works over costs. Costs also need to be proportiante to the work at hand - often overlooked by surveyors.

RICS is still bad at regulating its party wall surveyors. There are some attempts to improve regulation but until a chnage in the law happens anyone can be a party wall surveyor, know nothing about it, prepare terrible documents and charge top dollar.

LA selected third surveyors are unsuual but if the Award that as served by him/her was deficient it ought to have been challenged.

As adjoining owners we have had party wall surveyor fees running well over £10k because of one incomplete and badly drafted award after another! We weren’t having any work done for our benefit either. We even had to appeal the third award - enough was enough as the surveyors were making awards purely to earn fees and amend the earlier awards for their own benefit without any neighbour dispute to settle! Thankfully it was set aside but I am in shock at the behaviour! The fees were definitely not proportionate!

It strikes me that the act relies on “gentlemanly” behaviour by surveyors but has become a magnet for opportunists! Many ex builders seem to turn to party wall surveying but I get the impression that many in the building trade would regard any customer as ‘fair game’ for supplementary charges. Therefore the opportunity to be judge and jury in deciding their own fees must be very attractive if you have no scruples!

Appealing an award is not for the fainthearted. Having that as the only form of “regulation” leaves the average homeowner very exposed to the “wild west”.

As an adjoining owner, I've just been served a final award that is meant to settle building works which damaged my house. The compensation I'm being awarded covers about half of the physical damage caused to my house and concomitant costs, and doesn't cover correspondence over two years, or the unnecessary disturbance that the works caused.

I had dissented from the notice because my neighbour's surveyor wasn't RICS-regulated, and I guess if I had relied solely on them, I might have ended up with no compensation at all (or, worse still, the issues might never have been fixed), but all in all my impression of RICS regulated surveyors has seen them go from hero to zero in my estimation.

My RICS-regulated surveyor was very slow to respond even in drawing up the original award (the first copy of which contained glaring errors and had to be corrected) and never went to the trouble of explaining, clarifying or discussing key points with me.

When it became clear that the works had not been completed to a good standard and were causing water ingress into my house (my neighbour's tenant had actually informed her landlord of an issue with the new guttering immediately after completion of the works, but the full scale only became clear a few months later when dampness appeared inside my property), my surveyor went completely incommunicado. It was only through repeated phone calls over a month, and then contacting the third surveyor, that I got any traction on this. I believe the issue is now fixed - although I will never know if this is the case as neither surveyor ever came out for a final inspection. This didn't stop them from, after half a year of me asking for an update, issuing a final award with a paltry compensation amount that doesn't reflect the damage I have suffered. I was sent the award in an e-mail that made no further comment about its contents or any sort of explanation or context. The award contains factual errors that could have been avoided by as little as a phone call to me to seek clarification.

At various points during this entire process, my surveyor lied to me: he had suggested in a phone call relating to dust/noise that this would be regulated by way of compensation (to get out of addressing it effectively there and then) and then later denied that had ever been discussed; he reported that works to address the issue had been carried out when no builder had been at the property all day - and the final award claims that the works exacerbated a pre-existing problem, which is a blatant lie. This also makes the schedule of condition (which doesn't mention the problem that the award now in a legally binding document claims to be pre-existing) completely worthless - what's the point if a surveyor just goes back on his documented findings when it makes his life easier?

Unfortunately the - very humble - sum I would consider reflective of the avoidable damage caused to me doesn't justify the costs of going to court to appeal the award.

Partly I do blame my neighbour's surveyor - this is an engineering firm overseeing the works my neighbour, who owns several properties, is carrying out on all of them, so their role isn't purely that of party wall surveyor - but it was precisely to shield me against such practices that I had engaged a RICS surveyor, and this offered very little protection. The only one in this process who acted in my interests was the third surveyor when I called upon him.

I've followed all the reasonable steps - identified a conflict of interest in my neighbour's surveyor that made dissenting necessary, got quotes and compared reviews for RICS appointed surveyors (he was quick to respond then), laying out my concerns about my neighbour's often inconsiderate approach very clearly when inquiring for a quotation, highlighted all problems, followed up on open questions, engaged the third surveyor when a deadlock was reached and ongoing damage to my property wasn't being addressed...and still I'm being left significantly out of pocket. I had initially requested that the third surveyor take over when the water ingress wasn't being addressed, but as this did then see some progress, unfortunately I didn't insist on this - that would have been a much better course of action than trusting in the professionalism of two surveyors who had already shown themselves to be slow and inaccurate.