Surveys and inspections
Buying and selling · 3 min read · revised August 2026
| Term | What it means here |
|---|---|
| Boundary survey | Establishes where the legal lot lines run and what encroaches across them. |
| Home inspection | A visual, non-invasive examination of structure, roof, services and drainage. |
| Specialist report | Ordered when the general inspection finds something it cannot resolve. |
| Appraisal | The lender's valuation; it is not an inspection and protects the lender, not the buyer. |
| Non-invasive limit | Nothing behind a wall, under a floor or beneath the ground is examined. |
| Written record | The report's value is partly that it dates a known condition. |
Two different documents that are often confused
A boundary survey is a drawing produced by a licensed surveyor showing where the parcel legally begins and ends, where the building sits on it, and what crosses the lines - a neighbour's fence, a driveway, a projecting eave, a utility easement. It is a legal document about land. A home inspection is a physical examination of the building by an inspector who walks the property and reports on what can be seen. It is a technical document about a structure. They answer different questions and one does not substitute for the other.
The lender's appraisal is a third thing again, and the most commonly misunderstood. It exists to reassure the lender that the property is worth enough to secure the loan. The appraiser is not examining the boiler. A purchase that has 'passed the appraisal' has been checked for nothing that concerns the buyer's own risk.
What an inspection genuinely covers
A competent general inspection covers the roof covering and its visible flashings; the structure so far as it can be seen from the roof space and any unfinished areas; walls, floors and ceilings for signs of movement or moisture; windows and doors; the heating and cooling plant and its age; visible plumbing and the electrical panel; drainage and how water is taken away from the building; and the grading around it. Water is the recurring theme, because in almost every housing stock the expensive faults trace back to water arriving somewhere it should not.
What it cannot cover
Inspections are non-invasive by definition. Nothing is opened, lifted or dug. Concealed structure, buried drainage, the inside of a chimney, the condition of a flat roof under a covering, and anything behind a finished wall are outside scope. An inspection also captures a single day. It cannot tell you whether a basement floods in a storm, whether a heating system copes in February, or whether a neighbour's tree is diseased. The correct response to a finding an inspector flags but cannot resolve is a specialist report, not a shrug.
Older and denser stock
In older urban housing, several things recur often enough to be worth asking about directly: the age and material of the water service and waste stacks, the electrical capacity and whether the wiring has ever been replaced, the presence of materials that were normal when the building went up and are regulated now, party-wall and shared-roof arrangements in attached houses, and any structural alteration made without a permit. In an apartment, much of what matters is not inside the apartment at all but in the building's own maintenance record and reserves.
Reading the report
Sort every finding into three groups: things that are dangerous, things that are expensive, and things that are merely old. Only the first two are worth negotiating about; the third is the ordinary condition of a used building. Then get an actual figure for the first two from someone who does the work, rather than arguing from the report's adjectives.
This is a general description of what these examinations are. It is not an assessment of any particular property and does not replace a report from a qualified surveyor or inspector.