My BRB Mortgage › Surveys and searches
Surveys, inspections and searches
Three different exercises are routinely confused with one another. An inspection is about the building, a survey is about the land, and a title search is about the rights. Each answers its own question and none of them answers the others.
The building inspection
An inspection is a visual, non-destructive examination of what is accessible on the day. It looks at structure, roof covering, drainage away from the building, the state of the heating and cooling equipment, visible plumbing and wiring, insulation and ventilation, and evidence of water where water should not be.
Its limits are as important as its scope. Nothing is opened up. Anything behind a finished surface, under a floor, inside a wall or beneath the ground is inferred rather than seen. Systems are tested as they operate on the day, in the weather of the day, which is why a roof can pass an inspection in August and leak in November.
Specialist follow-ups exist precisely because of those limits: structural engineering where movement is suspected, drain camera surveys, timber and damp investigation, chimney inspection, and testing for materials associated with the building's period.
The boundary or land survey
A land survey establishes where the parcel actually is: its boundaries as described in the record, the position of the buildings on it, encroachments across the lines, easements and rights of way crossing it, and setback compliance.
Fences are not boundaries. Long-standing occupation, informal agreements between neighbours and successive replacements of a fence line frequently leave the physical arrangement several feet from the recorded one, and it is the record that governs.
Title and the searches around it
A title search examines the chain of ownership and everything recorded against the parcel: mortgages and liens, judgments, unpaid assessments, easements, covenants restricting what may be built or done, and defects in earlier conveyances.
Around it sit the other enquiries: zoning and permitted use, whether past alterations were permitted and signed off, assessments and taxes, flood mapping, and whatever local registers record about the parcel and the area. Requirements differ by jurisdiction, and the practical point is to know which body holds the answer to which question.
Reading a report without panic
Every report on every building of any age contains findings. The useful distinction is between three categories: things that are wrong now and expensive, things that are ageing and will need money on a known timescale, and things that are simply how buildings of that period were made.
A roof with eight years left is not a defect; it is a dated future cost, and it belongs in the household's arithmetic rather than in the negotiation, unless the price assumed otherwise.
What none of them can tell you
No inspection, survey or search establishes whether the price is sensible, whether the street will be pleasant to live on, or whether the household can carry the payment. Those remain judgements, informed by the three exercises but not answered by them.