Hello and welcome to today’s property surveying blog post where I am going to be looking into Party Wall Surveying matters, in this blog post we are going to be looking into the average cost for the Party Wall Surveying procedure.
When it comes to Party Wall Surveying procedures it can be difficult to give an exact cost on the procedure as a whole as it will all vary on how the Party Wall Notice is responded to and how many different properties the planned works are likely to affect.
Leaseholders Vs Freeholders
A further thing to consider would be if the properties are freehold or leasehold as if your neighbor (the adjoining owner) is a leasehold property then both the leasehold and the freehold would be entitled to receive a Party Wall Notice and consequently are each able to appoint their own surveyors if they so choose to.
So, you could have situations where two Party Wall Surveyors have been appointed for one property, one of which would be acting on behalf of the leasehold and the other acting on behalf of the freeholder.
This is why it can be extremely difficult to come up with an exact figure for the average cost for the Party Wall Surveying procedures would be, as there can be a huge amount of differing scenarios when it comes to implementing the Party Wall etc Act 1996 each of which will cause the price to vary.
Party Wall Notice Consent
If everyone consents to the Party Wall Notice then this would be the best case scenario in terms of keeping costs down.
This would mean that the neighbors would be happy for the works to proceed and so they would be no need for any further input from the Party Wall Surveyor in terms of implementing further procedures and you would only incur the cost of sending the Party Wall Notice.
Although the adjoining owners could consent with stipulations such as the carrying out of a Schedule of Condition inspection (SOC) per and post works which will cost circa £350 plus VAT.
Party Wall Notice Dissent
Whereas if all the adjoining owners were to dissent to the Party Wall Notice and chose to appoint their own Party Wall Surveyor then this would be the most high-cost scenario, as you would then be liable for the cost of not only your own Party Wall Surveyor, but, also the adjoining owners Surveyor and as I have stated above they could potentially be a different Party Wall Surveyor for both a freeholder and the leaseholder of the property which would go to increase the cost of the Party Wall Surveying procedure.
At Stokemont we would recommend that you should budget around £1500 for each of the adjoining surveyor’s fees alone on top of the fees of your own surveyor.
If we were to take a typical situation into account of a mid terrace owner wishing to do works that are going to affect both sides each being freehold and each of the adjoining owners were to choose to appoint their own surveyor then a typical fee that could be associated with this would be around £2000 – £3000 all in, when taking into account the fees for the adjoining owner’s surveyors and for our own.
The middle ground option is if the adjoining owners were to dissent and appoint an agreed surveyor, this would be when there was one surveyor who would be acting on behalf of both parties involved and so the building owner would only be responsible for the cost of one surveyor.
In situations like this, we would charge around £800 to be the agreed Surveyor if there was just one other party involved, the more parties that are involved then the higher the fee would be.
We hope this gives you further insight into some of the fees that are associated with Party Wall Surveying procedures and into Party Wall Surveying procedures as a whole, if you have any further questions about Party Wall Surveying procedures then please do not hesitate to get in touch today and one of our experienced team of Party Wall Surveyors will be happy to assist and advise you.
