Home buyer and building surveys

It’s your responsibility to check for structural risks and problems when you buy a house or flat. By going ahead without a survey, you could therefore find yourself with a property that needs extensive repairs or can’t be sold on for anything like the amount you paid for it.

If a survey does reveal the property needs work, you may also be able to negotiate a better price. The same is true if the survey suggests a lower market value than the price you’ve agreed, so getting a survey can save you money on the purchase – as well as in the future.

The Mortgage Valuation is for the lenders benefit and doesn’t provide any details regarding the condition of the property – you may not even get to see a copy of the report.

When you appoint a RICS-regulated surveyor to provide you with a full and thorough survey, you can relax knowing you have a full understanding of the condition of the property before you sign on the dotted line.

No, identifying any problems with a property is the buyer’s responsibility, so you don’t have to get a survey to sell your house. You may, however, wish to get a survey done to reassure potential buyers – for example, if it’s a very old property or you’re close to a flood risk area. 

When selling your home, you also have to provide an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating the energy efficiency of the property with a letter between A and G. 

When you book a RICS Level 2 Survey, the surveyor will check all major indoor features including ceilings, walls, and bathrooms, as well as exterior features such as roofing, pipes, gutters, walls, windows, and doors. Problems they will look out for include leaks, subsidence, and rising damp.

You’ll also receive background information on the property and location, an estimated rebuild cost you can use for insurance purposes, and an assessment of the damp-proofing, drainage, and insulation (but not the drains themselves).

Surveyors use a special damp, or moisture, meter to check walls for rising damp. They also check for signs of damp such as stains, rotting floorboards, and peeling paint, which can be caused by leaking pipes, accidental floods, or insufficient ventilation.

Yes, both Level 2 and Lever 3 Home Surveys involve window checks, including whether or not the windows are double glazed. Most surveyors will also want to open the windows so they can check for damaged timber, and make sure the keys are not missing. 

Yes, surveyors will check the loft because it’s often the easiest place to spot potential problems such as a leaky roof or insufficient insulation. If you’ve had your loft converted, they’ll also want to check the quality of the work. If you’re planning to convert the loft space after buying a property, a surveyor can also tell you whether or not this is possible.

The cost of a Level 3 Home Survey depends on the property being surveyed, but prices start at around £600. A Level 2 Home Survey is generally a cheaper option at around £345 +VAT according to Optimus – although its cost will also depend on the size and value of the house or flat in question. Either way, you can find a better deal by shopping around.

If you have to pay for your mortgage lender’s valuation survey, the average cost is around £250. A basic Level 1 Home Survey, meanwhile, costs from £300.

Other mortgage types to consider

Other mortgage types you might want to consider if you’re looking to remortgage include:

• Capped rate mortgage: a capped rate mortgage is a variable rate mortgage, but there is a limit to how high the rate can go. This can be useful if you want a variable rate mortgage, but also want to avoid unaffordable payments if the rate rises.

• Discounted mortgage: a discounted mortgage is another type of variable rate mortgage which offers a discounted rate on the lender’s SVR for a certain period of time.

• Offset mortgage: an offset mortgage helps to reduce the overall interest you pay by offsetting your savings against the outstanding balance of your mortgage. But this does mean you won’t be gaining any interest on your savings during the deal.

Fixed rate mortgages have an interest rate that stays the same for a set period. This could be anything from two to 10 years. Your repayments are the same every month and you don't need to fear fluctuations in interest rates. Most will charge you a penalty - known as an early repayment charge (ERC) - if you choose to leave the deal before the end of the fixed term.

Interest rates adjust periodically with a variable rate mortgage, which means repayments may change throughout the loan term. Usually, the interest rate changes in relation to another rate - the Bank of England's base rate is very influential on variable interest rates, as is the base rate of each lender.

For standard variable rate (SVR) mortgages, each lender has an SVR that they can move when they like. In reality, this tends to roughly follow the Bank of England's base rate movements. SVRs can be anything from two to five percentage points above the base rate – or higher – and they can vary massively between lenders.

The other type of variable mortgage is a discount mortgage. Rather than being linked to the Bank of England base rate, discounts are linked to the lender's standard variable rate (SVR). For example, if the SVR is 4.50% with a discount of 1%, the payable mortgage rate is 3.50%. If the SVR rose to 5.50%, the pay rate would rise to 4.50%.

The problem with discounts is that SVR changes are at the lender's discretion so your mortgage payments could change even if there has been no alteration in the Bank of England base rate. What's more, even if the SVR changes following a move in the base rate, there is no guarantee that it will increase or decrease by the same amount.

As a result, trackers are usually seen as more transparent than discounted deals and are often seen as being fairer for the borrower.

When the base rate fell from 5.00% to 0.50% between October 2008 and March 2009, for example, Lloyds TSB was the only top 20 lender to reduce its SVR by the full 4.50%. All the others cut their rates by less.

When the Bank of England raised the base rate from 0.25% to 0.5% in November 2017, anyone who wasn’t on a fixed rate mortgage was at risk of seeing their repayments increase. A number of leading mortgage lenders followed and increased their tracker and/or SVR rates a month later.

Most mortgage deals carry arrangement fees, which can vary from a few hundred pounds up to a couple of thousand.

Also bear in mind that these set up costs can sometimes be made up of two fees. An increasing number of lenders charge a non-refundable booking fee, which is effectively a product reservation fee. If your house purchase falls through and you don’t end up taking the mortgage deal, you won’t get this fee back.

The second type of fee is an arrangement fee which you pay on completion of the mortgage so you won't have to pay it if, for any reason, you don't take the mortgage.

Calculate how early you could pay off your mortgage. But make sure you read our mortgage overpayment guide first, as overpaying isn’t the right move for all homeowners.

Mortgage overpayment calculator

Remember to always factor these into the overall cost of any deal. Even if a lender is offering a seemingly unbeatable rate, steep fees could mean that it actually works out to be more cost-effective to opt for a higher rate, but with a much lower fee, or no fee at all.

The best mortgage rate for you depends on how much you are looking to borrow. A high fee is often worth paying in order to secure a low interest rate if you are applying for a large mortgage. But those with smaller mortgages could be better off opting for a higher rate and lower fee.

However, while this is the general rule, it is well worth crunching the numbers when you are comparing mortgages - you need to work out the total cost over the term of the deal. For example, if you are going for a two-year fix you need to work out the cost of your repayments over the term. You can do this by finding out what the monthly payment will be using our mortgage calculator – and then multiply by 24. You then need to add on the arrangement fee to find out the total cost.

You will likely find that you have more mortgage deals available to choose from if you have a good credit history, so it’s worth making sure that your credit report is as good as it can be before applying for a mortgage. Steps like paying off any outstanding borrowed credit you owe and making sure your current address is on the electoral role can help to improve your credit score.

The more money you can save as a deposit, the less you’ll need to borrow as a mortgage loan – and having a bigger deposit can help you get access to more competitive mortgage rates. Lenders will often have a maximum loan to value they’re prepared to offer you, and the rest will need to be made up with either a deposit or an equity loan like the government’s Help to Buy equity loan scheme.

Using a mortgage comparison tool can help to give you a better idea of how much you’d need to pay in monthly costs and interest, the duration of the deal, the maximum LTV and any product fees you may need to pay for the mortgage deals available based on your borrowing requirements. It’s important to remember though that the actual mortgage deals you’re offered when you go to make an application may differ because they will then be influenced by your financial situation and credit history.

Get free mortgage advice, and see deals from the whole of the market, with broker London & Country. Call free from your landline or mobile on 0800 170 1943 any day.

Read more about London & Country

With around 4.5 million adult children living at their parents’ house, the Hotel of Mum & Dad is a major part of British life.

In most cases, the situation arises out of necessity. Rents are sky-high, and getting on the housing ladder is notoriously expensive in many parts of the country, so children have little choice but to return to the family home.

But that in itself brings its own pressures and concerns for parents and their offspring. What are the additional costs of having another person under the roof? How do family members get along on a day-to-day basis when they might have different schedules, responsibilities and preferences?

We’ve explored these and related issues in a survey of what is undoubtedly the biggest hotel chain in the UK. And we’ve built an interactive calculator so that parents and children alike can work out how much they’re spending or saving by being in their own Hotel of Mum & Dad.

Check in here

MoneySuperMarket gives you lots of clever ways to save a lot, by doing very little.

• Take control of your credit score by checking and improving it for free with Credit Monitor

• Never overpay again with Energy Monitor, our energy monitoring service

• Over 50 ways to Get Money Calm

So how do we make our money? In a nutshell, when you use us to buy a product, we get a reward from the company you’re buying from.

But you might have other questions. Do we provide access to all the companies operating in a given market? Do we have commercial relationships or ownership ties that might make us feature one company above another?

We commit to providing you with clear and informative answers on all points such as this, so we have gathered the relevant information on this page.