TRANSCRIPT:
Buying a Property – Survey Reports – What are they and do you need one? (Pre-Purchase Property Reports)
Hi everyone and welcome to another video in my buying a property series on residential property in NSW. I’m Alexandra and in today’s short video, I’ll be looking at survey reports – what are they and do you need one?
As always, I invite you to please support my channel – subscribe and hit the like button, I’ll be posting a new video every week.
A quick disclaimer that my videos are general and informational only. They are not intended as legal advice and shouldn’t be relied on as such. Please see the full disclaimer in the description box below.
If you’ve been following along, you will know that the survey report with diagram is one of the 4 types of pre-purchase property inspections your lawyer will typically recommend you obtain before exchange of contracts, depending on the type of property you are buying, together with the:
- Building Report
- Pest Report &
- Building Certificate.
As I said, this video will focus on the Survey Report – videos on the other common reports are linked below. Some contracts contain survey reports provided by the vendor to assist you, which saves you both the time and money of ordering one yourself. If that’s the case, you should make sure that the survey report attached to the contract is current (i.e. not an old report) before you rely on it.
It is not a legal requirement for the vendor to provide you with a current survey report and if they haven’t provided one, it is generally advisable for you to obtain a survey report before exchange of contracts if you are interested in purchasing a property that’s vacant land or with any kind of house that is not a unit or a community title property for example.
A survey report is important for a number of reasons.
Firstly: it identifies the boundaries of the land you intend to purchase. This may sound obvious but in reality, purchasers have been known to buy the wrong land, or they may think they are purchasing a particular property but part of the land actually belongs to a neighbour, or the land being purchased is in fact larger than what it looks like (because fences are in the wrong place). Even greater care needs to be taken to identify the property in a subdivision of featureless land when an agent can inadvertently number the lots differently from the lot numbers in the deposited plan…
Secondly: a survey also identifies buildings on the property which encroach onto your neighbour’s property or visa versa. For example a fence may be sitting in the wrong place indicating the property is bigger or smaller than it is or a neighbour’s garage or house may be built on the land you are interested in or visa versa. I have professionally come across a property where part of a backyard pool was built across a neighbour’s land, which as you can imagine, throws up a lot of issues.
Thirdly: the survey also lets you know whether buildings on the property comply with any covenants and restrictions attached to the land, such as, that any structure on the land must be built with bricks or be painted a certain colour for example; and
Fourthly, your lender may require you to obtain a survey report before exchange of contracts, so please always check their requirements before proceeding to exchange contracts.
Timing is everything. I can’t stress enough the importance of knowing whether a property has any of the problems I’ve just mentioned before you enter into the contract to purchase it (i.e. before exchange). Generally if you discover any of the issues after exchange of contracts there is probably nothing you can do about them – you will still be required to complete the purchase even if you don’t want to anymore. And finally, if all these reasons are not enough;
If you want to obtain a building certificate, most councils will require you to obtain a current survey report in order to make an application for a building certificate (and please note: a building certificate is different to a building report – and I have made separate videos on each of these which you’ll find in the Pre-Purchase Property Searches playlist).
And that is all I have for you today on survey reports. As always – please remember to “SUBSCRIBE” and hit the “Like” button if you liked this video, please share it and if you’d like to make an appointment to engage our services, please follow the link in the description box to contact me. If you have any topics you’d like me to address in future videos, please leave a comment in the comment section as I’d love to hear from you. I hope you found this video helpful and thank you for watching.