RICS bid to make Home Buyer Report valuations optional for buyers

The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors wants to make a valuation an optional element of the long-standing Home Buyer Report.

This will allow RICS members who conduct surveys but are not registered valuers, to offer the report to buyers.

The suggestion is contained in documents now out to consultation to RICS members until the end of this month, and comes as the institution continues to emphasise that the HBR is a report on the condition of a property, and not a report on its value.

Writing on the institution website, Graham Ellis - RICS’ residential associate director - says it has been an anomoly that HBRs carry valuations, while the Condition Report and the Building Survey products do not.

“We have started to address this anomaly by making the valuation on the HBR optional.  We have done this by having two different reports, simply one with the valuation section (ie, no change from the present report) and one without. Members and lenders who wish to carry on using the traditional HBR with valuation can do so, while others may offer the choice to the buyer to meet their individual needs” says Ellis.

“The next step will be to do provide an optional valuation with the Condition Report and Building Survey, so that ultimately, buyers will be able to have any of the three survey products with or without a valuation, as they prefer” he continues.

Details of the with- and without-valuation documents can be found here.