"The best way to truly understand the condition and value of a property is with a physical inspection and our surveyors are prepared with the right guidance and equipment to begin visiting properties again."
The new document sets out guidance for working in other people’s homes and applies to a number of home workers, including surveyors.
The guidance still recommends that businesses should "make every reasonable effort to enable working from home as a first option" and find digital or remote alternatives to physical work where possible.
However the government will now allow home visits where digital solutions cannot be found, as long as workers follow social distancing guidelines.
Arnold & Baldwin Chartered Surveyors and SDL surveying have since announced that they will resume physical valuations where possible.
Joe Arnold, managing director at Arnold & Baldwin Chartered Surveyors, said: “The official government guidance for working safely in other people’s homes during COVID-19 is a detailed document that specifically references surveyors and effectively opens the door for the safe resumption of physical property inspections. This is excellent news for the property market as it means that we are effectively back in business. It does state however, digital inspections are to be undertaken where possible and physical inspections should be avoided.
“At Arnold & Baldwin, we believe the best way to truly understand the condition and value of a property is with a physical inspection and our surveyors are prepared with the right guidance and equipment to begin visiting properties again. We also recognise, however, that remote valuations are going to be an integral part of the market for quite some time and so we have introduced a menu of options for lenders that addresses some of the limitations of remotely valuing a property, including ways of mitigating the risk on more unusual properties and addressing the restrictive parameters of some funding arrangements, which do not traditionally permit remote valuations. We will be publishing more details on these in the coming days and so able to offer a complete range of valuation solutions to help the market recover and get back onto the front foot.”
Simon Jackson, managing director of SDL Surveying, commented: “We are very pleased to announce the immediate recommencement of physical inspections and to say that, from today, our surveyors will be visiting properties in order to carry these out in a controlled and safe fashion.
“The nature of the threat from Covid-19 means that safety is of paramount importance which is why we’ve put in place a new full inspection procedure that each surveyor will be using on every job.
“This follows current safety guidance, has been approved by our lender clients, and means we can start inspecting properties from today in order to get those cases moving through the system again.
“A significant amount of work has gone into this from the SDL team and we believe it demonstrates our commitment to our bank and building society partners and a shared desire to get the market moving again. We are anticipating a large volume of backlog cases to be completed over the next seven to 10 days which is why we have moved all our surveyors and booking team out of furlough in order to make sure we get through this work as quickly as possible.
“These are of course early days but this is a major step forward on the road back to normality and it is testament to the planning and preparedness of the SDL Surveying team that we can begin inspections today and produce the mortgage valuations which consumers, mortgage brokers and lenders are waiting for.”
