This fortnight brought two announcements that, taken together, point to a fundamentally different survey market
by the end of the decade. RICS is finalising a new Home Survey Standard, and the government has confirmed
that property condition reports will become part of every home sale. Neither change has landed yet. Both are
coming, and practices that start preparing now will have an easier autumn than those that wait.
A new Home Survey Standard is nearly here
RICS ran an eight week consultation on updates to the Home Survey Standard between August and October last
year, and it drew more than a thousand responses from the profession. The regulator is now working through
that feedback, described as the most time intensive stage of the process, and aims to publish the second edition
of the Standard this autumn. Consultation feedback pointed to clear demand from consumers for surveys that are
clearer, more consistent and easier to understand, alongside a related consultation exploring whether home
survey work should move toward formal regulation. For firms already producing detailed, structured reports, the
direction of travel should feel familiar rather than alarming. For firms still working from ad hoc templates or
handwritten site notes, tightened consistency requirements are going to mean real changes to how reports get
written.
Condition reports are heading into every sales pack
Separately, government has confirmed plans for legislation requiring sellers to prepare a sales pack before a
property is listed, including searches, legal and title information, and a property condition report. Sales packs
remain voluntary for now. Guidance is expected later this year, a further consultation is planned for 2027, and
mandatory legislation will follow once the groundwork is in place, with no commencement date yet confirmed.
Nobody needs to panic, but the precedent is being set. A property condition assessment, produced early and
consistently, looks set to become a standard part of how homes come to market, rather than an optional extra
buyers request after an offer is accepted. Industry voices are already calling for more surveyors to be brought
into the reform process, which says something about where demand is heading.
What this actually means for practices
Put the two developments together and a pattern emerges. Consumers and regulators want surveys that are more
standardised, more consistent between practitioners, and delivered earlier and more often in the transaction. That
is good news for surveying as a profession. It also means firms relying on disconnected tools, a notebook on
site, a separate word processor back at the office, a CRM that does not talk to either, will find it harder to keep
pace as volume and scrutiny both increase. Consistency at scale is as much a workflow problem as a
professional standards one.
Getting ahead of it now
Practices do not need to wait for the second edition of the Standard or for sales pack legislation before
tightening up. It is worth reviewing how current survey templates map to the existing Standard, closing the gap
between what gets captured on site and what ends up in the final report, and checking that every report your
practice produces would hold up to the clearer and more consistent bar that consultation respondents were
asking for. Firms that treat this as routine housekeeping now will find the eventual transition far less disruptive
than those who wait for the rules to land before adjusting.
Scafol was built for exactly this kind of shift, connecting lead capture, offline site data collection and RICS
aligned report generation in one platform, so practices spend less time reconciling formats and more time
surveying. See how it works at scafol.io
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