A DIRECTOR of a Glasgow building firm who has had to fight for months to change an inaccurate home report claims many of them are not worth the paper they are written on.
Simon Dale had to bring in a specialist and threaten legal action before the surveyor would back down.
“It’s a scandal – home reports are a complete lottery,” said Dale, director of West Renovations Ltd. “You can get good home reports but they seem to vary from surveyor to surveyor and poor ones can cost buyers and sellers thousands and thousands of pounds.
“In the one I had to fight to change, the seller nearly lost £20,000 because the home report wrongly claimed there were damp problems.”
West Renovations had completed an interior refurbishment for the seller after a damp course had been put in to the Queen’s Drive flat a few years previously.
When the work was finished the estate agent arranged for a surveyor to make a home report, and Dale was at the flat when he arrived.
“I timed him and he was there for 12 minutes. During that time he put a damp meter on one wall and got a positive reading so he wrote in the home report that it was saturated with damp.”
Dale knew a damp meter should not be used on the wall as it had previously been treated for rising damp, which would make the readings inaccurate – but the surveyor refused to listen.
“The Property Care Association says moisture metres shouldn’t be used to test the efficacy of walls previously affected by rising damp and the surveyor should have known this but he insisted on making the wrong conclusion, which could have cost my client tens of thousands of pounds. The offers my client started getting were £20,000 less than it was worth as people were panicky because of the report. They were thinking it was going to cost a lot to fix it, but there was no damp.”
In frustration, Dale called in specialist George McGill to carry out carbide testing, one of the most accurate ways of testing for moisture. The tests found the presence of hydroscopic salts that would skew any moisture meter reading.
“Salts are almost certain to be present in a place previously affected by rising damp, which is why the Property Care Association say not to use them,” said Dale.
However, the surveyor and estate agent refused to accept the specialist report and only agreed to change it when Dale threatened legal action.
“We had done £50,000 worth of work, which included new floors, full plastering, rewiring, replumbing, refurbished windows, a full new heating system and brand new kitchen. It was basically a brand new flat. This guy spent 12 minutes in the house then billed my client £600 for his services.
“He surveyed it in August but it has only just been sorted out.
“It was total idiocy– just outrageous. A good home report should flag up potential problems but we could do without them making things up.”
The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors’ Scotland (RICS) defended the quality of home reports.
Director Sarah Speirs said: “Home reports were introduced in December 2008 to improve the quality of Scotland’s housing stock and to reduce multiplicity. The Home Report documents comprise a survey report, valuation, energy report and property questionnaire, which are there to ensure that buyers and sellers of houses in Scotland have better information about the condition, energy efficiency and value of a house at the start of the buying and selling process.
“Home Reports are carried out by chartered surveyors who are amongst the most highly regulated professionals in the UK. RICS members must adhere to a strict mandatory set of valuation standards which are internationally recognised.
“While we cannot commented on individual cases, recent research from the Scottish Government five-year review of the Home Report indicates the Home Report’s success in meeting its original objectives."
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