pumpkinstrokemarrow

Another bunch of people who are supposed to bear witness are surveyors. Now, despite all the noise and waste paper associated with HIPs, the underlying idea is attractive. You collect all the stuff up about a property to be sold and make it available to all comers, up-front. That way you only have to pay once and there are fewer unpleasant surprises. Otherwise, there is a collection every time someone tries to buy the property. Which is presumably, on average, something more than once. Plus the unpleasant surprises. Surveyors and such like people in clover, ordinary decent citizens out of pocket.

So, enter the HIPs, which on plan A were to include a structural survey. But this has fallen by the wayside and so the HIPs are far less useful than they might otherwise have been. Although we do get pretty graphs about the latest eco-fads. So the question is, how did the surveyors get away with it?

One story was that a surveyor produces his report for a client and is responsible for that report to that client. He can't be responsible to everyone and his (or her) dog. But I do not see why not. If the report is materially or unreasonably defective, and it would be easy to devise reasonable procedures for deciding whether a report was materially or unreasonably defective, the surveyor should be liable, whoever it might have been who found the defect or suffered the consequences of the defect. The liabilities could be covered by some sort of insurance - as it is now - and the reports could be filed at the Land Registry for public posterity.

One catch might be that sellers would drift to surveyors who were known not to be too hard on properties. But that could be dealt with by an Offsurf which could regulate the industry. Maybe capped at 500 FTE employees to keep the bureaucracy under control.

Another might be the business of price, against the present background of surveyors playing very safe and giving low valuations, which frighten buyers and the backers who are lending them the dosh. Is it reasonable to include a valuation in a more or less public survey report, remembering the old saw that a house is worth what it fetches on the day?

Another concerns defects in the property, rather than in the report. Suppose there is something in the property which is a bit odd. The seller has had the oddity thoroughly investigated by his surveyor and they decided that all is OK. But we suppose that there was an element of judgement here. Another surveyor might have taken another view. Does the seller have any duty to declare the oddity, only to claim that it is not an oddity? Would such a declaration make the property rather hard to sell? Would prospective vendors see the qualification on the report, shake their heads and move on? Would declaration of everything odd make people very cautious about being odd? Stifle all innovation in the building game?

Moving on from oddities to minor defects, should the seller have a duty to list them ad nauseam, in the way that the buyer's surveyor does now? Where does one draw the line? I do see something of a conflict here. It is up to the seller to explain what is right about a property and it is up to the buyer to explain what is wrong about a property. That is the way buying and selling works.

Furthermore, if I buy a footballer for lots of dosh, I certainly do not take the selling club's word for it that he is OK. I get my own doctor to give him a going over.

I wonder if all this has its roots in our adverserial legal culture. Each lawyer fights his corner and may the best man win. Us anglos are convinced that this is the best way to get at the truth. Every strange and ingenious line of argument gets bashed down to the truth. But buying all those lawyers to do the bashing does not come cheap. Which brings us back to where we started, trying to save some money. Value for money rather than the best possible result on all occasions. So getting the seller to do a survey and to make it available will do most of the time. There are no big issues with most properties. And if the buyer has some big issues, he can always pay another surveyor to do some more. The point is to buy the right house, not to sue surveyors, and most people will be sensible most of the time. So after all this rigmarole, I vote for a survey in the HIP until someone can make a better fist of the argument against than I have.