Why we still inspect
every property ourselves.

Where inspection is possible, we inspect.

There is a version of property valuation that never requires anyone to leave their desk. Data feeds, Land Registry records, automated valuation models, satellite imagery: the tools available for producing a number without visiting a property have never been more sophisticated. Some lenders use them. Some platforms are built on them. And for certain purposes, in certain controlled circumstances, they are a legitimate approach.

Our default is different. This article explains why.

What inspection actually does.

A valuation is an opinion of what a property would achieve in the open market on a given date. To form that opinion, you need to understand what the property is, not just what it appears to be on a plan or in a listing, but what it actually is: its condition, its layout, its aspect, its relationship to the street, its neighbours, its problems.

None of that is reliably available from a desk.

The things that matter to buyers, and therefore to value, are often precisely the things that don’t appear in data. The flat above a commercial unit that turns out to face a blank wall rather than the garden shown in photographs. The retail unit whose frontage is partially obscured by a permanent market stall. The house whose rear elevation backs directly onto a railway cutting that no mapping service adequately conveys. The mixed-use building whose upper floors smell of damp from a roof that has been leaking for years.

Each of these factors affects value. None of them appears in a comparable transaction database. The only way to know about them is to go and look.

— The simple part The only way to know is to go and look.

What desktop valuations miss.

The limitations of desktop valuation are well understood within the profession, which is why the RICS Red Book requires valuers to inspect properties they are valuing unless there are specific, documented reasons why inspection is not possible. This is not a bureaucratic requirement. It reflects the reality that a valuation without inspection is a valuation missing a significant part of its evidence base.

In practice, the things desktop valuations consistently miss fall into a few categories.

1. 01

   Condition.

   Photographs, even good ones, are selective. They show what the seller or agent chose to photograph, from angles they chose, in lighting they controlled. An inspection reveals what the photographs didn’t. Damp. Settlement. Poor repair. Evidence of previous works that may have been carried out without consent. None of these necessarily prevents a valuation from being produced, but all of them affect it.

2. 02

   Layout and liveability.

   Floor plans tell you the size and configuration of rooms. They don’t tell you whether a kitchen is unusably narrow, whether the principal bedroom overlooks a noisy road, or whether the living room receives natural light for less than two hours a day. Buyers experience properties in three dimensions, and their willingness to pay reflects that experience. A valuer who has not had that experience is missing something buyers have.

3. 03

   The immediate environment.

   The street, the neighbours, the noise, the parking, the aspect, the access: all factors that buyers assess, consciously or not, when they form a view of what a property is worth. Data tells you what postcode a property is in. It cannot tell you that one side of the street is materially more desirable than the other, or that the property sits adjacent to a commercial use that introduces noise and odour at certain times of day, or that the access road floods.

4. 04

   Tenanted properties.

   For investment properties (retail units, flats in multiple occupation, mixed-use freeholds) inspection reveals the actual condition and character of the tenancies in a way that a schedule of leases cannot. A tenant who has been in occupation for twenty years and has clearly invested in their premises is different from a tenant on the same lease whose unit is barely trading. That difference matters to a purchaser, and it should matter to a valuation.

The accountability argument.

There is also a straightforward professional accountability argument for inspection. When a valuation is relied upon (for tax purposes, for a sale, for accounts, for litigation); the valuer is accountable for the opinion they have expressed. That accountability is much harder to sustain if the opinion was formed without seeing the subject of it.

A District Valuer reviewing a probate figure, an auditor querying an accounting valuation, a judge in a property dispute: all of them will want to understand the basis on which the valuer reached their conclusion.

Where inspection fits in the process.

It is sometimes assumed that inspection is the time-consuming or costly part of a valuation instruction. In our experience, it is neither. Getting to a property, walking it, and forming a clear view of what it is — that part is straightforward. The work is in what comes after: the research, the evidence, the analysis, the reasoning, and the report that has to hold up under scrutiny.

Inspection is not the hard part. It is the foundation that makes the hard part possible. A valuation built without it is built on assumptions where there should be facts, and those assumptions have a way of surfacing at the worst possible moment — when the figure is challenged and the valuer has to explain how they reached it.