The jury is still out over real value of new home reports

Published on Wednesday 4 March 2009 20:47

THE controversial compulsory home reports are keeping the Scottish housing market alive, Scotland's surveyors have claimed.

But the claim, based on research published today, has been dismissed by critics of the new buying and selling regime as bearing no resemblance to reality.

Home reports, required for almost every property marketed in Scotland, came into force last December and feature a single survey, including a valuation, an energy report and a property questionnaire.

According to the research for the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics) in Scotland, the country's ten largest chartered surveyor firms carried out 13,999 home reports between 1 December and 22 February.

Of the ten firms, eight said they believed home reports had helped increase the number of inquiries from potential buyers.

The same number said the reports had not affected the number of homes being put up for sale, with one firm claiming it had encouraged more sellers to the market. While the number of house sales has halved in the last year, according to the latest Lloyds TSB Scottish house price monitor, all firms surveyed by Rics said the credit crunch and not home reports were to blame for the slump.

Professor Lorne Crerar, chairman of Harper Macleod and chair of the Scottish Executive task force that created the concept of the single survey contained within home reports, welcomed the research.

Crerar said: "Home reports provide buyers with purposeful, meaningful information including a market valuation which makes the house buying system so much more efficient and easy to access for enquiring buyers."

But Ian Ferguson, spokesman for the Scottish Law Agents Society (SLAS), which opposed the introduction of home reports, yesterday maintained the research did not reflect reality.

Ferguson said: "It bears no resemblance to what solicitors and estate agents, who actually sell property, are seeing. There are vastly fewer people putting property on to the market."

Before their introduction Ferguson had predicted that home reports would prove fatal for the Scottish mortgage market, a view he believes has been vindicated. The reports are holding back the property market recovery and deterring speculative sellers from putting their home on the market, said Ferguson.

However Scott Marshall, vice-president of operations at RE/MAX Scotland, said opponents of home reports were overlooking their main function of simplifying the house-buying and selling process and making it more transparent. He said: "The Rics findings now indicate that, within three months of home reports being introduced, the public recognises their value and are demonstrating a renewed confidence in the market."