When is a structural survey not a structural survey?

The process of buying a house is fraught anyway, but one of the things that sometimes pops up is the need for what others call a structural survey. The lender will send a valuation surveyor to determine whether the figures stack up for them. If they see something they don’t like – a crack, some distortion – they may well call for a report from a structural engineer (I don’t know how often this happens because I only hear about the ones where I am called in).

This is sometimes referred to as a structural survey and I have to clarify the difference between that and what I actually do – a visual inspection.

A structural survey involves finding out the size of floor joists, walls, foundations etc and carrying out an assessment of the various elements and determining their capacity and how well they act together. This requires a destructive survey – floor boards lifted, ceilings taken down, holes dug around the property and so on. Not only is this noisy and messy but it’s also expensive – starting at around £2,000 I would suggest. The resultant document is a thick wadge of paper full of numbers and diagrams.

Effectively I am designing the building again.

And it’s not what is required. A visual inspection on the other hand involves me walking around the building and looking at stuff. The most important stuff is usually the thing that piqued the interest of the valuations surveyor in the first place. As is noted in the opening paragraph of the resultant letter “no finishes were removed as part of this inspection”. From this visual inspection most engineers are capable of assessing what’s happened, what will happen and what needs to be done about it.

This exercise in semantics is only important when things go horrible wrong and people with QC after their names are involved. In these instances, folk care less about what was said and a lot more about what was written down, which is why the fact that I am carrying out a visual inspection is made very clear at the beginning of the letter.