ABOUT VALUING & SURVEYING

At this early stage in this Web site, it is necessary to explain the definition of "Surveyor" and "Valuer". The public perception of "survey" and "valuation" and "Surveyor" and "Valuer" has in our opinion been a major cause of significant misunderstanding over the years.

A Valuer is an individual who inspects a certain property merely for valuation purposes. In our case this is usually to assess the property as a suitable security for a lending institution (a Building Society or Bank) when the property is being purchased (a mortgage valuation), but also for matrimonial, probate or other such purposes. This valuation is usually the price (the Open Market Value) at which the property would sell at the time of inspection after a reasonable marketing period – the usual selling price of a property.

A Surveyor is an individual who carries out a more detailed examination, a survey, of the structural and general condition of a building, usually only for the client/purchaser. We at McDonald & Chivers are both Valuers and Surveyors but we don one "hat" for one job and another "hat" for the other. To complicate matters further, we sometimes do valuations and surveys on the same property – a valuation for the mortgage lender and a survey for the client / purchaser.

So, after having carried out a mortgage valuation, if a client telephones and asks "how did the survey go?" we reply that we did not carry out a survey, merely a valuation for the lender to assess the property as a suitable security on which to lend money. When we take the house keys back to the selling agents and are asked, "is there anything wrong with the survey?" we say that we did no survey, just a valuation. In our opinion, the distinction between the two is most important – too many purchasers rely on the valuation as a survey.

Many purchasers do not see the relevance of a mortgage valuation. If you lend money to a friend on the security of, say, a diamond then you would want to know that that diamond is indeed a diamond and not a piece of glass, that it is in reasonable condition/quality, that it is worth at least the loan amount, and that it is saleable. So it is with a Building Society/Bank, a property, and a mortgage. As Valuers, we are the eyes and ears of the lender, telling them want they want to know about a particular property.