There are only two types of survey - one that you have before buying a property, and one that you have after buying, that informs what you do with the building to make it into your dream home.
Our Building Surveys are far more detailed than the best RICS Level 3 building survey. We research planning history and Listing status where relevant. The detail in our surveys comes from our experience in restoring and re-building old structures, whether they are brick, stone or timber framed. We KNOW what is likely to be underneath the fabric. We UNDERSTAND the materials used, and the implications of this to cause dampness and decay. We do NOT use the standard RICS equipment list: damp meters are useless. WE use thermo hygrometers and thermal imaging cameras to help record and diagnose problems associated with moisture. Our skills in building pathology are some of the best in the country - and form part of every survey. It is our detailed scientific understanding of the physics of water that underscores each survey. Water is the cause of 98 percent of all building issues - dampness, rotting timber, flaking paint, hollow render, peeling plaster, rusting metal, spalling bricks. We've written the book on it: The Warm Dry Home - and it is this huge store of knowledge that we draw on for our surveys.
There are many survey formats on offer, mostly designed by RICS as quick tick box 'convenience' surveys for surveyors undertaking several surveys a day. The RICS 'Homebuyer' survey is the most notorious of these. It is a heavily promoted format, with standard answers, tick boxes, and a traffic light system of colours for any issues seen. It is useless for old houses. Some surveyors working for large companies have to complete at least four of these A DAY.
RICS promote other survey formats - Level 2, and Level 3 - all of which rely on the tick box format, with increased amounts of space left in the forms for surveyors to 'add' detail not contained within their standard lists of drop down answers. All of these are designed to be filled in by a surveyor on a little mobile tablet, on the day of the survey - sometimes with photos at the end.
These RICS formats are useless when applied to old houses - they do not provide enough detailed information for a buyer to make informed decisions about a purchase. RICS level 3 surveys provide a constant source of Expert Witness legal cases for us when surveyors fail to observe critical issues in old houses.
We refer to the various survey formats used by others because our website has to include such search terms, so people find us.
Other 'names' for surveys can include 'structural survey' - which is just a way of describing a full building survey, or 'historic building survey' - which just means a survey of an old building. Timber and Damp surveys exist purely because of the insistence by RICS valuation surveyors to offload responsibility for any issues relating to dampness in buildings they 'survey'.