Often the lender will make it a condition of the mortgage that you resolve the damp problem.
Tim Kenny is the proprietor of Tim Kenny Surveying and a Council Member of the Residential Property Surveyors Association (RPSA)
The Valuation Survey has found damp, what do I do now?
No doubt this is a question you hear from time to time, particularly with older properties, and one which can sometimes spell the end of a purchase or at the very least cause a lengthy delay. However, with the right approach this does not have to be the case.
The first thing to do is remind your client that a valuation is not a survey. Although it may have been a surveyor who visited the property, the inspection that would have been carried out is in no way comparable to even the lowest level survey inspection. To avoid confusion I will refer to valuers and surveyors separately.
Most valuers will carry out between four and six valuations a day. When you factor in the time spent getting to and from each location, picking up keys and filling in the paperwork it does not leave much time to actually look round each property. It is not uncommon for valuers to spend as little as 15 minutes in the property they are valuing. This is not long enough to carry out a full inspection for damp, let alone spend the time identifying the cause and considering solutions. Instead the valuer has to make assumptions based on things like the age of the property, whether it has a damp proof course or any obvious external problems.
Please do not take the above to suggest that valuers don’t an important job. Of course, they do have a very important role to play in the process but you must remember that their role is important to the mortgage lender not your client.
If a report says that damp has been found it will rarely say where, what the cause is or the severity of the problem. So it comes down to the homebuyer to sort out what to do next, and often the lender will make it a condition of the mortgage that you resolve the damp problem. So what is the next step?
The best thing the homebuyer can do is to appoint a surveyor to carry out either a home condition survey or a building survey at the property. Tell the surveyor that damp has been found at the property and that they (the buyer) need to understand how to resolve the issue. If the homebuyer instructs any other type of survey, whilst these will identify the damp, they are unlikely to provide the level of detail required as to the cause and what to do about it.
As an alternative, the buyer might consider asking a surveyor to report only on the damp issue. This will certainly be a cheaper option but probably not by much. The surveyor will still have to inspect the whole property to fully assess the damp problem so why not have him report back anything else he finds? Remember the valuer may not even have looked in the roof space and a lot of nasty problems can lurk up there.
The other option your client can consider is arranging for a damp treatment company to visit the property and provide a specialist report and a quote. However, damp treatment companies only really specialise in treating one form of damp – rising damp. This is the form most people will have heard of but is actually the least common. Yet if you ask a company which specialises in treating rising damp to tell you what type of damp has been found, nine times out of 10 they will tell you it is rising damp!
This is not fraudulent or dishonest in any way on their part – rather, damp is just a very difficult issue to fully diagnose. Water can spread and run long distances before it shows up as a serious issue and it takes a lot of skill and knowledge to follow the trail properly.
RPSA surveyors who offer either a home condition survey or a building survey are very well equipped to help your clients get to the root cause of any damp problem. It may be as simple as replacing a stretch of guttering to resolve it!
