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How Not to Throw Away £1000s on your next Measured Building Survey

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Sometimes measured building surveys can go terribly wrong. So bad that you can be faced with insolvency or unable to pay the contractor or architect to fix the problem caused by the surveyor.

Here are some of the things that can go wrong:

  1. Wrong dimensions
  2. Correct levels
  3. Missing features
  4. Revisits

Of course there are many more but we’ve only highlighted the most critical items that can cost you money.

The Biggest Risk

The biggest risk from poorly produced measured survey is wrong dimensions, and angles of your property. Even though it looks like a tiny problem but it can mean that later on you might face additional costs from your contractors to make things right. This can mean delaying the project to get additional materials, or resources to get it right.

Most contractors charge for delays and additions, this can range from £200-1000 a day. This will be charged while the issue is getting resolved by your architect and surveyors. It could cost you even more if you have bespoke materials that needs to be factory manufactured.

Or sometimes it will affect you earlier in your project; resulting in resubmission of your planning application to the council for approval. You might even need to wait another 6-8 weeks to get the go ahead.

How can you solve this?

Getting the right surveyor is key to avoid these losses, and it’s not hard to find them. We’ve highlighted the three critical items to look out for:

Fully Insured

First of all, the surveying company needs to be insured. Without the correct insurance, you might not be able to recover the losses from the surveyor. There are a lot of rogue surveyors, or one man band undertaking surveys without adequate insurance. Check with them before you proceed. You want to protect your investment.

At Icelabz we are fully covered, and we have been trusted by over 300+ clients and architects.

Get Sample Drawings

Make sure that your architect or consultant is happy with the surveyor’s sample works. If you are not too technical about the plans, here is a trick: just check if the corners of the rooms have correct angles. As most walls and corners are not perfect in a building, you should expect the surveyor to pick up the discrepancies of odd shaped walls and corners. If the angles of the rooms are squared or the walls too straight, then the surveyor didn’t spend enough time surveying to produce high quality plans.

You would expect a surveyor to survey the room with their angles correctly.

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Correct methods of survey

It is the biggest oversight in surveying, and many clients do not know what to look out for when selecting a surveyor. Depending on the method that the survey uses, the accuracy and risks varies.

The more manual the survey method is the higher the human risk in producing the plans. For example, if a survey is heavily reliant on sketches and notes there is a higher chance of human errors.

Here is a table of some surveying methods based on equipment used:

Method Human Error Accuracy Cost Time to Survey
3D Scanning Low 5-15mm Expensive V. Fast
Total Station Medium 5-10mm Normal Normal
Disto Meter High 10-25mm Low Cost Normal

Our Method

At Icelabz, we have devised a unique method of surveying to provide you with a low risk survey while keeping the cost low. We provide you with high accuracy 3D scans at the same price of conducting a survey using the Total Station led method. Not many companies can do this because of the high cost of the equipment, software and licenses.

We could have only achieved this with our bespoke software and procedures that cannot be replicated anywhere else.

Our Unique Model

Our unique model allows us to:

  • Survey different properties every day without affecting the delivery time of your drawings
  • Have different surveyors working on your project without losing quality or relying on one surveyor’s presence.
  • To take on many projects from small to large without sacrificing on delivery.
  • Avoid revisits on site so that you do not face additional fees
  • Quickly add additional features and respond to queries faster than our competitors.
  • Produce evergreen surveys allowing you to request additional sections, and elevations of areas we have surveyed months after the survey.

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How to get the best Prices for a Measured Building Survey or Topographical Survey?

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We get over 20+ enquiries in a week, some of the time the client has no clue what they are requesting as they have been directed by their architect or a friend. Sometimes it confuses the client, and he or she ends up paying for too much or ‘quite often’ too little.

Coming from a commercial background and looking after projects in the £millions, we have to take certain steps to ensure that we get the best value for money and that we are not underserved or over-served. This is one of the reasons you engage a quantity surveyor on your project – to ensure you are purchasing the right service for the right price and the right contract.

In this article I am going to show you a few things to consider when requesting for prices (quotes) for your measured building survey and topographical survey. This will ensure you get a comparable survey which will give you the most competitive and correct quote for your job.

 

#1 Prepare and send the same scope of work to all the surveyors

Most of the time you would be provided with a brief scope from your architect or nothing at all. You might just be asked to get a measured building survey or topographical survey of your property, and that is it. This can be difficult for the surveyor to price and quote the job properly and cause for back and forth communication until the scope is defined. This can happen with several other surveyors and they might each price something differently.

If the scope is correctly defined, all the tenderers (surveyors) will need to have the same & correct information to price on. Most surveyors will just need the minimum of the following information:

  • Full address of the property (with a site plan)
  • Rough area per floor
  • How many plans and type (floor plans, sections, elevations, etc…)

To help you, we have written this very simple scope sheet that you can use to send to the surveyors in your area to get a quote.

 

#2 Do your due-diligence – check their insurances

Most land surveyors that you will find online or in the yellow pages do not have insurance or the wrong type of insurance. This is a must if they are working on your property and delivering work for your architect and the rest of your project. If they provided the wrong information and your architect & builder relies on it and caused you financial loss for the mistake you need to ensure that the surveyor is covered for this and compensate for the mistake. Without insurance you cannot recover the losses you have incurred.

You need to ensure their insurance covers their service; i.e. land surveying or measured building survey. You also need to ensure that they have insurance to cover damages to your property while they are within your premises or to the public.

 

#3 Ask for samples (if they have not provided them)

Each surveyor or surveying company have their format of producing the plans for your property. Some are cumbersome, and some have too little details. This is also another way to check the skills of the surveying company – you get to see what they can produce.

If most of their plans look ‘squared up’ then the method they are using are not accurate. Most buildings are not straight and have certain deviations on the floors and walls. This may cause issues and additional costs when designing your property for construction. The materials for the internal parts of your building might not fit in.

Just to recap; If the plans are too ‘squared’ then it may not be wise to choose that particular surveyor for the survey as they may not measure the true angle of your property.

#4 Review everything with your architect

If you have an architect, it is best you run through the quotes in detail with your architect to ensure that what they are going to survey captures everything he needs for your planning application as well as for the construction. For example, some features such as sockets and lights are not standard features to measure in a measured building survey.

You can also ask your architect to review the scope that you have to produce to ensure that you are sending the right information to the surveyors.

To summarise, just make sure that you send as much and the same information to surveyors to get the right price. Use our Scope Sheet for Surveying to help you get started.