When did anyone ever actually teach you how to look at a property? And I don’t mean how to imagine living in it, or whether you like the kitchen, or whether there’s enough storage. I mean really look at it — at the fabric of the building, at the things that tell you about its condition, at the things that could end up costing you a significant amount of money.
For most people, the honest answer is: nobody ever did. And yet the viewing is one of the most important moments in the whole buying process. So I want to explain what it’s actually for — and what most people are missing when they go on one.
What most buyers actually do on a viewing
Most buyers go on viewings because they know they have to. You can’t buy a property without looking at it — people who try, and some do, usually get themselves into trouble. So at a basic level, they go around to make sure the property is all right. It’s not obviously falling down. It looks like what you’d expect for the kind of money you’re thinking of spending. It passes some kind of general impression test.
And then they either make an offer, or they don’t.
What they’re not doing is gathering information. They’re not asking themselves: what is this property actually telling me? What does the condition of this building mean for what I’m about to commit to? And the reason they’re not doing that is pretty straightforward — nobody ever showed them how. It’s not taught. Not at school, not by the estate agent showing them round, not by anyone involved in the process at that point.
The two traps
And not knowing what you’re looking at creates two very different problems, and they run in completely opposite directions.
The first is over-caution. You see something at a viewing — a crack in a wall, some signs of what might be damp, some evidence that there’s work to do — and because you’re not sure what you’re looking at or what it would actually cost, you walk away. To be on the safe side. And the property you’ve just walked away from might have been perfectly fine. That crack might have been entirely innocent to a trained eye. You’ve lost a potentially good deal because you didn’t have the knowledge to assess it properly.
The second problem runs the other way. The property has signs all over it that something is wrong — things that anyone with experience would pick up very quickly — but to an untrained eye, they simply don’t register. And so the buyer proceeds, makes an offer, the offer is accepted, and it’s only later, when the survey comes back or when they actually start work, that they find out what they were actually looking at.
Both of these errors come from exactly the same place: not knowing what you’re looking at during the viewing itself. And both of them are expensive in different ways.
The middle group
And then there’s a third group, in between those two. These are the buyers who are self-aware enough to know that they’re not confident — and so they won’t commit to anything without a builder’s inspection first, or a full structural survey. Which sounds sensible. And sometimes it is.
But it goes one of two ways. Either the survey comes back and shows nothing serious was wrong — and they’ve spent money and time they didn’t really need to spend, on a property that a bit more knowledge at the viewing stage could have told them was fine. Or the survey shows considerably more than they feared — and they wish they’d found that out before spending anything at all. If they’d been able to see at the viewing what the surveyor later confirmed, they could have walked away at no cost.
In both cases, more knowledge at the viewing would have led to a better decision.
What knowing how to look actually changes
And this is really the point. Knowing what you’re looking at changes not just what you decide, but whether you even need a survey in the first place — and if you do, what kind.
If you can see — because you know what to look for — that a property has serious problems that make the deal unworkable, you don’t need to spend money finding that out from a surveyor. You can walk away at the viewing stage, at no cost.
And if you can see that there are specific things that need a professional eye before you commit further, you can make that call precisely — commission the right kind of survey, at the right level, for what you’ve actually seen. Rather than defaulting to a full survey on everything just because you don’t know what else to do. I should say, as a Chartered Surveyor, that a survey is usually money very well spent. But knowing what you’re looking at means you can make that decision properly, rather than out of anxiety.
And it’s worth saying that the viewing isn’t only about condition. It’s also about whether the property fits what you’re trying to do with it — whether the layout works for your strategy, whether the location is actually what the listing photographs suggested, whether there’s anything nearby that would have changed your thinking if you’d known about it before you made an offer. Most people don’t use the viewing for any of those things either. And by the time they find out, it can cost them.
Here’s to successful property inspecting.
Peter Jones
Author, property investor and ex-Chartered Surveyor
PS. 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 thepropertyteacher.co.uk/63-common-defects-investment-property-spot/
