Rising doubts
Ross Clark
IF THERE is one group of people who should be bursting with enthusiasm to reelect the government, it is the chartered surveyors. Never exactly the most popular group in society, they are being wooed with a job-creation scheme of massive proportions. If they are not already performing cartwheels in their offices, it is probable that they cannot quite believe they are going to get away with it.
Among the pearls of the current legislative programme, no doubt to be hurried through in the last few hours of the Parliament while MPs' minds are on other things, is the Homes Bill, the aim of which is to speed up the home-buying process and reduce gazumping. Before placing their homes on the market, homeowners will in future will obliged to compile a 'seller's pack'.
Some of the contents of this pack are reasonable enough: few would argue with the requirement that vendors, as they tend to be called in the business, should be able to provide their title deeds, proving that they actually own the property they are trying to sell. The sting in the tail, however, is the obligation on every vendor to pay for a structural survey of their home before plac ing it on the market, the cost of which will make up the bulk of the estimated E700 cost of assembling a seller's pack. The assumption behind the legislation is that a full structural survey is just that: an accu rate, brick-by-brick assessment of a building's structure. No more shall buyers be befuddled by sellers hiding damp patches behind the furniture or papering over the cracks.
The reality is quite different. If you want to know whether your house is going to fall down, you might as well consult the runes as commission a full structural survey. Two years ago when I moved house I did have one of these structural surveys done: a 50page, £900 document which was full of idiots' advice but proved to provide information so far removed from the actual condition of the house as to make it laughable.
That our surveyor was not an intrepid sort was evident from some of the statements with which he qualified his thumbnail sketch. You will appreciate that it is difficult to accurately gauge the condition of the external joinery beneath both paintwork and guttering from a distance,' he began. Indeed it is: it is just that in return for £900 one might have expected him to bother to venture up close. Then there was this excuse for not bothering with the floors: 'The vendors confirm that fitted floor coverings are included in the pro posed purchase price. We, therefore, were careful not to damage any carpets and were unsuccessful in being able to lift any corners of the fitted carpet at ground-floor level.' Aside from my objection to the use of the royal 'we' — perhaps designed to give the impression that a small army of inspectors were crawling over the place, when in fact only one man in a suit was involved — I couldn't quite see how this qualified as a 'structural' survey when anything hidden from immediate view was dismissed as being beyond the scope of the inspection.
Small wonder, then, that the surveyor failed to notice that the roof tiles, which should have been laid down with a threeinch overlap, in places had virtually no overlap at all, causing years' worth of rainwater to tumble through the roofspace, out through a rotten soffit and then into and down the walls — £600-worth of damage which he dismissed, from his distant vantage point, with the words, 'We noted one possible slight leak at a junction on the rear north-facing elevation.'
And no wonder he failed to notice that the lining in one of the chimneys had failed, stinking out the bathroom with a smell of soot and burnt oil. Things had
become so bad that tar had begun to ooze through the brickwork — 'some historical staining' in the words of our surveyor. There were soothing words, too, on the condition of the drains: 'In a high-density situation such as this, we would anticipate that all surface water passes into a mains drainage system.' Actually, they didn't: the downpipe had simply been stuck in the ground by some unscrupulous builder with no drainage system of any kind. Reassurance, too, about, the apparent damp on the end wall — 'some slight mossing, as you would expect' — which turned out to be a leaking overflow pipe that had been discharging water into the brickwork for years.
How did the surveyor earn his £900? By prodding the living-room walls with a 'moisture meter' and declaring that we had a serious case of rising damp that needed urgent attention. Visions of having to swim to the dining-room were later put to rest after the first winter, when, in spite of bucketfuls of rain, our 'rising damp' remained a figment of the imagination of the surveyor's moisture meter.
It is hardly as if my experience is unique. A friend who had once been an estate agent told me that part of a surveyor's training is that they don't even seek to sniff out trouble beyond your skirtingboard: 'They are told not to move furniture, go up ladders, enter the loft or generally get their suits dirty.' When he came to sell his own house, he strategically placed pieces of furniture around every wall and sat down to enjoy the sight of this poor, besuited figure unable to inspect a thing. It is as if chiropodists were instructed that on no account must they remove their patients' shoes.
The justification for pushing the Homes Bill through Parliament, according to housing minister Nick Raynsford, is the success of a pilot scheme in Bristol, where 100 vendors compiled seller's packs. Of the 100 attempted sales, 87 went to completion, compared with 72 per cent of attempted housing sales nationally. Sellers and vendors alike, he claims, were pleased with the system. But then vendors in the pilot scheme didn't have to fork out £700 — the pack was compiled for them for free. Thirty of the houses being sold were new properties, where the condition of the building and the security of the title deeds are less likely to be an issue than with the second-hand homes that most people buy. Worse, 30 buyers were reported to be unhappy with the quality of the structural survey that had been carried out. In spite of being able to consult the survey which the vendor had funded out of his own pocket, many building societies still insisted on sending round their own surveyors, meaning that many houses were surveyed twice, helping to line the pockets of surveyors — but, if my own experience is anything to go by, leaving no one any the wiser as to whether the roof was leaking or the guttering assembled correctly.
Tp,o.
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