Early in my career, a more experienced colleague took me along to value a property that had been fully redecorated before going to market. Everything looked fine — clean, bright, freshly painted throughout, well presented in every way. My colleague walked in, had a look around, crossed the kitchen, and then did something that surprised me. He took his car key out of his pocket and pressed it into the bottom of the skirting board in the corner of the room.
The key went straight in. Not resistance, not a slight give — it simply disappeared into the board. What had looked like a solid, freshly painted skirting board was rotten timber behind the paint, the wood having been destroyed by damp that had been there long enough to do serious damage. Someone had painted over it rather than replace it, and to the eye it looked fine. To a car key, it was hollow.
My colleague looked up at me. ‘Always look at the skirting,’ he said. ‘They can paint a wall, but they often don’t bother replacing the board.’ Then he added — and I’ve always remembered this — that you should only do this in extreme circumstances, because it makes a mess of the skirting and most sellers don’t appreciate it. The point wasn’t to go round prodding every skirting board with your keys. The point was to know that freshly painted woodwork at low level is one of the things worth paying attention to, and that in a property where something feels off about the presentation, it tells you something a visual inspection won’t.
That moment was somewhere in my mid-twenties, and it’s stayed with me for forty years — not because of the skirting board specifically, but because of what it represented. Properties tell you things. If you know what to look at and what it means, you can read what a property is actually showing you, even when the person selling it would prefer you didn’t look too closely.
The other side of that lesson — and this is equally important — is that the professional eye doesn’t just help you spot things that are being concealed. It also stops you being scared off by things that look alarming but are actually manageable. I remember looking at a property that had a stepped crack above a ground floor window, badly repointed so it was very obvious — the kind of crack that photographs badly, puts buyers off, and tends to sit on the market while people convince themselves something terrible is wrong with the building.
What I could see, looking at it, was that the pattern and position of the crack was consistent with a lintel problem — almost certainly the result of new windows having been installed at some point without a proper lintel above the opening. This is not a minor issue, but it is a known one, with a known solution. I was going to ask the estate agent whether a lintel had already been installed and the crack simply hadn’t been made good yet — because that does happen — but either way, this was something that could be properly assessed and properly fixed. It wasn’t a sign of the building collapsing. It was a sign that something specific had happened at a specific point and needed addressing.
A buyer without that knowledge, walking past and seeing that crack with its ragged, messy repointing, would almost certainly keep walking. A buyer who understood what they were looking at would see an opportunity — a property sitting on the market longer than it should, at a price that reflected the uncertainty rather than the actual cost of the repair.
What forty years of walking into properties has given me is not a sixth sense. It’s not some special talent. It’s a very long list of things worth looking at, and enough repetition that looking at them has become automatic. The pattern and position of cracks, and what different patterns indicate. The condition of low-level joinery. The smell of a kitchen or a basement. The gap in a door frame and whether it’s even. A loft hatch that’s been sealed. These things are all learnable — they’re not complicated, they don’t require professional qualifications, and they don’t require forty years to accumulate. They require knowing that they’re worth looking at.
The frustrating thing, from a buyer’s perspective, is that this knowledge exists perfectly well among professionals and experienced investors, but it doesn’t tend to reach the person who actually needs it most: the buyer standing in a property on a Saturday afternoon, trying to decide whether to make an offer. That gap is where expensive mistakes happen — not because buyers are careless or naive, but because nobody has shown them what to pay attention to. A property viewing feels like it should be about whether you like the house. What it actually is, if you approach it correctly, is the best opportunity you’ll ever have to understand what you’re buying before you’ve paid for anything.
Once the survey’s been done and the solicitors are instructed and you’ve told everyone you’re buying this place, the barriers to walking away are considerably higher than they were when you were just having a look round. The viewing is where your leverage is. Use it.
Here’s to successful property inspecting.
Peter Jones
Author, property investor and ex-Chartered Surveyor
By the way, if you’d like a practical guide to what to look for on a property viewing, my book 63 Common Defects covers the things that cost buyers money when they miss them — and how to spot them before you commit. You can find it at
63 Common Defects In Investment Property And How To Spot Them
