What a Level 3 Home Survey Actually Involves!
Most people buying a house have a rough idea of what a survey is. Someone turns up, has a look round, writes a long document, and somewhere in it there is a sentence about the gutters. That is the general impression, and it undersells what a RICS Home Survey Level 3 actually does.
I want to use a recent job to explain it properly, because it shows both halves of the work: the inspection itself, which is the part people picture, and the desk study, which is the part almost nobody thinks about and which, on this particular job, is where the whole thing turned. The buyers have kindly allowed me to refer to it, and I have kept the property generic. It was a detached bungalow on the outskirts of Scarborough, built in the early 1990s, in a quiet spot with good sized gardens and a double garage.
On paper it was close to perfect. In most respects it genuinely was.
It starts with a conversation!
Before the desk study, before the inspection, there is a conversation with the buyer, and I would put that first in order of importance. Some surveyors forget this, but it is important to know you and what your needs are, some people are buying for investment purposes, some for buy-to-let, and some more more simply want a home that will become a nest for their family.
By the time someone instructs a survey they have usually viewed the property one or two times. They have walked the rooms, looked at the garden, talked about where the sofa goes. They know far more about that house than I do at that point, and they very often have something specific sitting at the back of their mind. My job is to find out what it is.
Sometimes what the buyer wants is straightforward reassurance. They like the house, nothing has jumped out at them, and they want someone who knows what they are looking at to go through it properly before they commit several hundred thousand pounds.
Just as often there is one particular thing nagging at them. A crack above a door frame that they have convinced themselves is subsidence, when in nine cases out of ten it is seasonal shrinkage in a plastered partition and nothing more. A patch on a ceiling. A smell in a cupboard. A roof that looks a bit green from the pavement. Those concerns deserve to be taken seriously and answered directly, because until someone explains what they are actually looking at, that worry sits there and colours the whole purchase.
So I ask what is on their mind, I agree where the extra attention is going to be focused, and I make sure the report answers the question they actually asked rather than the one I assumed they were asking. A surveyor who does not listen will produce a technically correct report that leaves the client no wiser about the one thing they were worried about.
The desk study: the foundation everything else sits on
Before I set foot on site, I carry out a desk study. On a Level 3 this is not a box ticking exercise, it is the groundwork that tells me what to look for when I get there, and it is the thing that most often turns up something the inspection alone would never reveal.
The desk study pulls together the documented history of a property from the records that are publicly available, plus whatever the client and the agent can supply. On a typical job that means the following.
The title register and title plan, which tell me who owns the property, what is included in the title, what easements benefit and burden it, and what covenants sit over it. It also shows whether any land has been sold off, which is far more common than people realise.
The agent's particulars, current and historic. Old listings are gold. The way a property was described and photographed three, five or ten years ago often tells you exactly what has changed since, and sometimes what has been quietly covered up.
The Energy Performance Certificate, including expired and superseded ones. The EPC records the property's construction, its insulation, its heating, its floor area and the number of rooms, all at a particular date. Compare an old EPC to a current listing and any discrepancy is worth chasing.
Planning records and building control records, which are held separately and need searching separately. Planning permission and building regulations approval are two different things, and a property can have one without the other.
Flood risk, from rivers, the sea, surface water, groundwater and reservoirs, both for the present day and for the climate change period.
Radon potential for the grid square, geology and ground stability from the published British Geological Survey mapping, coal mining reporting areas where relevant, historic landfill, and whether the property is listed or sits in a conservation area.
None of this is a substitute for the environmental search your solicitor obtains, and I always say so. What it does is give me a picture of the property before I arrive, so that my time on site is spent looking in the right places.
On this bungalow, the desk study threw up a straightforward discrepancy. The current listing marketed four bedrooms over two floors. The EPC, lodged a few years earlier, described a single storey bungalow with three bedrooms. The previous sales listing described a three bedroom bungalow with a loft "partially converted, mainly boarded with Velux windows". And the building control register, searched properly, held three records for the property: replacement windows in 2019, replacement windows and doors in 2024, and a gas boiler in 2024. There was no application, no approval and no completion certificate for any loft conversion. Nothing. Not under the current address, and not under the address the plot was originally carved out of.
That is the moment a desk study earns its fee, because I now knew precisely what to examine when I arrived.
What I actually inspect on a Level 3 Home Survey
A Level 3 is the most thorough of the standard residential surveys. It is a detailed inspection of every element I can reasonably reach and see, with a condition rating against each one, an explanation of what the defect means and advice on what to do about it. In broad terms, here is what gets looked at.
Outside, I inspect the chimney stacks, their flaunching, terminals and flashings, the roof coverings, the ridges, hips, valleys and any rooflights, the rainwater goods, the main walls and their pointing, the damp proof course and the air bricks, the windows and external doors, any conservatory or porch, and the external joinery such as fascias, soffits and bargeboards. I use a drone where the roof pitch and layout allow it, which gets me far closer to a stack or a valley gutter than standing in the garden with binoculars ever will.
Inside, I inspect the roof structure and the roof void, the ceilings, the internal walls and partitions, the floors, the fireplaces and flues, the built in fittings including the kitchen, the internal joinery and staircases, and the bathrooms and sanitary fittings. Moisture readings are taken throughout with a Protimeter, and I use a thermal camera where it helps identify cold spots and condensation risk. Where a client has told me they want particular attention paid to something, that is where the time goes.
Services are inspected visually. I am not a Gas Safe engineer or an approved electrician, and a surveyor who tests services is operating outside their competence. What I do is record the make, model, age and apparent condition of the boiler, the consumer unit and its circuits, the earthing arrangement, the water supply and pressure at the taps, the hot water arrangement, and the drainage so far as it can be seen by lifting inspection chamber covers. I then tell you plainly what needs testing by a specialist and what certification should be produced.
Outside again, the grounds are covered: the garage, outbuildings, boundaries, retaining walls, paving and drives, and any vegetation close enough to the building or the drains to matter.
Every element gets a condition rating. Rating 1 means no repair is currently needed. Rating 2 means a defect that needs attention but is not serious or urgent. Rating 3 means a serious defect requiring urgent repair, replacement or further investigation, and those are the ones that should be resolved before you make a legal commitment to purchase.
What the inspection found
The bungalow itself was in genuinely good order. Modern cavity walls with no cracking and no sign of structural movement. A damp proof course visible, air bricks clear, and a draught moving through them, which tells you the sub floor void is ventilated as it should be. A concrete tiled roof in satisfactory condition with one broken tile across the whole of it. Ridge tiles securely bedded. Lead work properly dressed around the chimney. A boiler two years old with a service record. Certificated electrics. Windows and doors replaced under FENSA. No dampness recorded anywhere in the property. If the story had stopped there it would have been one of the easier reports I have written.
The roof space was the problem. A conversion had been started, forming what the listing called a bedroom, an office and a bathroom. The floor was carried on the original ceiling joists, 195 by 63 and 195 by 50 members specified on the 1992 drawings as SC3 grade, which under the grading system we use today broadly corresponds to C16. Those members were designed to carry a plasterboard ceiling and some boxes, not a habitable room.
A new opening had been cut through the ceiling for the stair, and cutting joists to form an opening interrupts the very members that were carrying the load. New partitions had been built in the roof space, and a partition puts a line load straight down onto the floor below it. The linings looked to be a single skin of plasterboard rather than the double layer usually needed to achieve 30 minutes of fire resistance, and the boarding, going by photographs from the earlier listing and from social media, had been cut into small manageable pieces rather than fixed in full sheets, which loses the integrity of the board and will crack at the joints in time. The floor boarding did not appear to have been laid to the normal standards for a structural floor. The bathroom was unfinished, with the floor unsealed and waste connections exposed.
I rated it Condition Rating 3 and advised that the space should be used for storage only, that areas of the floor would need opening up before anyone could say whether the work stood a chance of passing regularisation, and that if it did not, some or all of it would have to be stripped back and reworked. Possibly with steel beams introduced to reduce the spans.
What happened next
My clients went back to the agent for an explanation of who had carried out the work. What came back was that the conversion had been done piecemeal, with different parts carried out by different people connected to the household rather than by a single contractor working to an approved design. The position taken was that building regulations consent had not been necessary. Planning permission may well not have been required. Building regulations approval certainly was.
My clients withdrew and instructed their solicitor to stop work. The agent, unprompted, mentioned that the vendors were willing to reduce the price by a sizeable amount.
The property has since been relisted. It is now advertised at £45,000 below the original asking price, described as three bedrooms rather than four, with a note that the first floor offers an occasional room and shower room and that there are no building regulations for that room.
The survey cost a few hundred pounds. My clients walked away from a purchase they were no longer comfortable with, and the market has since repriced the property by £45,000, which is before the cost of regularising or redoing the work.
What this should tell you
Three things, really.
The first is that an unauthorised conversion is not a paperwork problem. It is a structural unknown. Nobody can tell you whether that floor is adequate without establishing the spans, the grading and how the openings and partitions have been supported, and all of that is now hidden behind plasterboard and floor boarding. The regularisation process itself is involved: structural calculations, an application to building control, an initial site visit, probable opening up for inspection, whatever remedial work the officer requires, and a further visit to sign it off.
The second is that the desk study matters as much as the inspection. I would have seen the conversion on site regardless. What the desk study gave me was the certainty that nothing had ever been applied for, and the photographic record of how the work was done, before it was covered up. That is the difference between raising a concern and proving a point.
The third is the one I started with. Ask your surveyor to listen, and expect them to. The survey is being carried out for you, on the house you are buying, and the concerns you arrived with are a legitimate part of the brief.
Here is what the buyer said afterwards, in a review left of their own accord:
"Could not rate Richard higher. An excellent first class job for a property we were interested in buying. Richard listened to what we needed and agreed to focus on some key areas for concern. We had several conversations over the phone afterwards, with advice as well as info found, and the survey doc produced was detailed, informative and allowed us to make the decision on the property we were interested in. Would recommend using Skyline Property Surveys for any such work, the best surveyor we've come across."
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The phone conversations are worth drawing out. A report is only useful if you understand it, and I would far rather spend half an hour on the phone one evening explaining what a condition rating 3 actually means for you than hand over a document and leave you to it.
Skyline Property Surveys carries out RICS Home Survey Level 3 building surveys, Level 2 HomeBuyer surveys, damp and mould surveys, snagging inspections and drone roof surveys across Bridlington, Driffield, Filey, Malton, Pickering, Scarborough, Whitby and the surrounding villages of North Yorkshire and the East Riding.
If you are buying in any of those areas and want to know exactly what you are taking on, before you are committed, get in touch for a quotation.
A final note
I would not want anyone to take this piece as a criticism of the property itself, because it deserves better than that. It is a genuinely fantastic bungalow. It has been meticulously maintained by its owners, and that shows in the things that matter rather than the things that are on show: brickwork and pointing in good order, a roof with a single broken tile across the whole of it, air bricks kept clear, no dampness anywhere in the building, a modern boiler properly installed and serviced, and certification in place for the work that has been notified. Plenty of properties I inspect have not been looked after half as well.
The grounds are a real asset too. A generous plot, mature lawned gardens, paved terraces, a block paved drive with parking for several cars and a detached double garage, all set well back in a quiet spot. There is far more outside space here than most bungalows of this size and age come with.
The issue is one unfinished piece of work in the roof space, and it is capable of being resolved. For somebody who goes in with their eyes open, has the structure properly assessed and takes the regularisation on as part of the project, this could be an excellent buy. My clients were not in a position to take that on, and that was the right decision for them. It will not be the right decision for everyone, and the next buyer may well see an opportunity. That is exactly what a survey is for, giving you the facts so that you can make your own call.
Thank you for reading. Best wishes Ricky Savage
Building Surveyor
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