Commerical Property

A due diligence report that lists every defect equally is easy to write and almost useless to act on. What changes a decision is knowing which items will need spending on inside three years, which belong in the price, and which are simply the cost of owning a building of that age.

We take a position and we explain how we reached it. If the answer is that the building is fine and the vendor’s report was overcautious, we will say that too.

That only works because the surveyor is not working alone. The fire engineer, the cost consultant and the rights to light specialist sit in the same business, so the questions that fall between disciplines get picked up rather than falling through.

Most of the value we add on standing assets comes from timing. Dilapidations advice is worth considerably more eighteen months before a break than six weeks after it. The same is true of fire risk assessments and compartmentation work, where having the evidence already is a very different position from assembling it under pressure.

We work with clients on that cycle rather than instruction by instruction, so planned maintenance becomes a budget you can take to asset review instead of a series of surprises.

None of this requires a big team descending on the building. Usually it is the same surveyor who knows the roof, the plant and the last three lease events, which is why the advice arrives quickly.

Commercial refurbishment rarely stalls on the building work. It stalls on the things around it. A party wall award that was left too late, a scaffold licence nobody applied for, a neighbour who has just taken advice on rights to light.

We look at those at feasibility, alongside the project and cost management, the CDM duties and the design. Not because they are complicated, but because they are slow, and slow is what breaks a programme.

Working in occupied buildings adds the rest. Tenant access, service charge consultation, phasing around people still trading. We plan that with the managing agent early, and we keep the tenants informed, because a refurbishment the occupiers understand is one that gets finished.