Your RICS Survey Came Back. Here's What to Do, in Order.

The report has arrived. It is forty pages long, a lot of it is amber or red, and somewhere in the middle is a sentence about movement that has made your stomach drop. You have an offer accepted, a solicitor billing you, an agent who will ring tomorrow, and no idea whether what you are holding is a warning or a formality.

Almost everybody reads their first RICS survey badly, and they read it badly in the same way: they treat the number of findings as the measure of how bad it is. It isn't. A thorough surveyor on a sound 1930s semi will fill twelve pages with amber, because their job is to record everything they saw and to be careful about what they could not see. The length of the list tells you how conscientious the surveyor was. It tells you very little about the house.

This is the order to do things in — what to do first, how to sort the findings, what the timeline actually looks like, what your lender might do, and how to know when the answer is to walk away.

The first hour: nothing

Do not ring the agent. Do not ring the seller. Do not forward the report to anybody with a question mark in the covering email.

The single most expensive thing you can do in the first hour is react. An agent who hears panic learns two things — that you are worried, and that you have not costed anything — and both of them weaken you for the rest of the negotiation. There is no deadline in that first hour. In England and Wales nothing is binding until exchange, and you have days, not minutes.

Read it once, all the way through, without deciding anything. Then put it down.

Sort every finding into three piles

Almost every RICS survey resolves into three groups, and only one of them is worth much of your attention.

Pile one: things you already knew

The kitchen is dated. The bathroom suite is avocado. The decoration is tired, the garden is overgrown, the windows are the ones you saw at the viewing.

These were visible when you offered and they are already reflected in the price. They belong in your own budget, not in a renegotiation. Asking for money off because a 1990s kitchen is a 1990s kitchen is the fastest way to lose a seller's goodwill and to make your genuine points look opportunistic.

Pile two: things that genuinely change the value

A roof at the end of its life. A failed damp-proof course. An electrical installation that needs replacing rather than tidying. Rot in structural timber. Drainage that has failed.

These are things you could not have known at the viewing, they are work you will have to fund soon after moving in, and they are the entire basis of any sensible renegotiation. This pile is what you spend your effort on.

Pile three: things that change whether you buy at all

Confirmed subsidence that is still moving. Dry rot through structural timber. Japanese knotweed within a few metres of the building. A loft conversion or a removed load-bearing wall with no building regulations sign-off and no realistic route to regularising it.

These need answering before anything else, because the answer might be that you walk. Do not start negotiating a discount on a pile-three item until you know what it is — you can end up successfully negotiating your way into a house you should not have bought.

Read the condition ratings properly

The RICS traffic-light system is more useful than most buyers realise, but only if you read what it actually says. If the red boxes are the part of the report keeping you up, there is a fuller breakdown of what a Condition Rating 3 actually commits the surveyor to and why a normal pre-war house generates so many of them.

• Condition Rating 1, green — no repair currently needed. The surveyor is telling you this is fine.
• Condition Rating 2, amber — repair or replacement needed, but not urgently. Most of your report will be amber and that is normal on any house that has been lived in. Amber is a maintenance schedule, not a problem.
• Condition Rating 3, red — serious or urgent. Needs repairing, replacing or investigating now.
• NI, not inspected — the surveyor could not see it. Not a clean bill of health, and worth noticing where it appears. A roof space recorded as not inspected on a ninety-year-old house is a gap in what you know.

Your renegotiation lives almost entirely in the Rating 3 items. Amber items are common to most of the UK housing stock and a seller will rightly resist paying for them. If you take one thing from the rating system, take that.

Our guide to what each RICS survey level covers goes through the ratings and the three levels in more detail.

The timeline, so you know what you are working with

There is more time here than it feels like, but it is not unlimited.

Days one and two — read and sort. Triage into the three piles. Do not contact anybody yet.

Days two to five — get pile two costed and commission any investigations. This is the part that determines everything downstream, and it is the part most buyers skip. A list of defects is a worry; a costed schedule is a position.

Days three to ten — the investigations come back. A structural engineer is usually a week or so; a drain survey can often be done within days. If the surveyor recommended crack monitoring, that is months, not days, and it changes the shape of the whole purchase — you either wait, negotiate for the uncertainty, or walk.

Once you have numbers — go back to the agent. Not before. One conversation with a schedule attached beats four without.

Then exchange. In England and Wales you can renegotiate right up to exchange of contracts, and you can walk away at no cost right up to it too. After exchange you are committed and the RICS survey is history.

The thing that actually creates time pressure is not the RICS survey. It is the chain, the seller's own purchase, and your mortgage offer expiry. Ask your solicitor what the real constraint is rather than assuming.

Getting pile two costed

This is the step that turns the report into something you can use, and it is the one thing a RICS survey deliberately does not do for you. Pricing repairs is not part of a surveyor's remit — most reports say so explicitly.

Two routes. Get two or three quotes from tradespeople for the specific items, which is free but slow and comes with an obvious incentive problem: a roofer quoting for a roof has a view on whether you need a roof. Or get the whole report costed at once by somebody who is not going to do the work.

Either way, the output you want is a schedule: each Rating 3 item, what it is, what it costs, and a total. Our RICS survey repair cost calculator prices the 57 findings that come up most often at 2026 rates and sorts them by urgency, which is a reasonable starting point before anybody visits.

For the actual figures behind the common findings — what a re-roof, a damp-proof course, a rewire or rot treatment really costs — we have gone through them here. And where the surveyor has written "further investigation is recommended", each of those investigations has its own price, most of them smaller than people expect.

What your lender might do

Two things can come from the lender's side, they feel similar, and they are completely different problems. Buyers routinely confuse them.

A retention

Where a valuer flags essential works, a lender may hold back part of the advance until those works are done and re-inspected. So on a £300,000 purchase with a £20,000 retention, you complete with £20,000 less than you expected and you get it once the work is finished and signed off.

The important part: you have to fund the works yourself first. A retention does not remove the cost, it moves it earlier and adds a cash-flow problem on top of a repair problem. If a retention appears, work out immediately whether you can actually cover it alongside your deposit and fees, and talk to your broker before you talk to the agent — because a retention is also strong evidence for a renegotiation. The lender has effectively agreed in writing that the work is necessary.

A down-valuation is a different problem

A down-valuation is the lender's valuer saying the property is worth less than you agreed to pay. It is not a list of defects; it is a disagreement about price, and it creates a shortfall you must cover in cash, because the lender will lend against their figure and not yours.

It is worth being clear which one you have received. A RICS survey full of amber items and a mortgage offer that came through untouched is a very different situation from a clean RICS survey and a valuation £15,000 below the agreed price.

Who to tell, and when

• Your broker or lender — first, if there is a retention or a down-valuation. They shape what is even possible.
• Your solicitor — anything with a legal dimension: no building regulations sign-off, an unresolved party wall matter, knotweed, an indemnity policy being offered instead of paperwork. They will also tell you where the real deadline is.
• The estate agent — once, and with numbers. Not before.
• The seller directly — generally not. It is the agent's job, and going around them tends to sour things.

Do not send the seller the whole RICS survey. You commissioned it, you paid for it, and handing it over gives away your entire position while inviting them to argue with the surveyor's wording rather than your figures. Send the schedule of the items you are raising, with costs.

Going back to the agent

Ask for a specific number attached to a specific list. "The RICS survey found X, Y and Z, all rated 3; here is what they cost; we would like the price adjusted by £N" is a proposal. "We're a bit worried about the RICS survey" is a problem you have handed to somebody whose job is to protect the seller's price.

Expect pushback, and expect it in a predictable shape — that the surveyor is covering himself, that they will get their own quote, that they will put it back on the market. Our guide to how much you can negotiate off after a RICS survey goes through the responses and the wording that works.

You do not have to ask for money. Depending on what you found, the better ask is sometimes that the seller carries out the work before completion, or that a sum is held by the solicitors until it is done.

When the right answer is to walk

Sometimes the numbers say don't buy this house. That is not a failure of the process, it is the process working — a RICS survey fee that stops you buying a £40,000 problem has paid for itself many times over.

Reasonable grounds to walk:

• The pile-three items cannot be resolved before exchange and you would be buying an unquantified risk.
• The total cost of the Rating 3 work exceeds what you can fund once your deposit and fees are gone, and the seller will not move.
• Crack monitoring is recommended and you cannot wait six to twelve months for an answer.
• Your instinct says the seller is hiding something — an alteration nobody has paperwork for, works described as "done years ago" with no records, a strong reluctance to let a specialist back in.

None of that costs you anything but the RICS survey and the searches. Compare that with being six months into a house you cannot afford to repair.

If you are buying in Scotland

The sequencing is different and it matters. The Home Report — including the Single Survey and valuation, both carried out to RICS standards — is prepared for the seller and available before you offer, so much of the information arrives earlier. And a concluded missive is binding, so the point at which you can still walk away comes much sooner.

The practical effect is that the triage and costing described above has to happen before you offer, not after. If you are commissioning your own additional inspection, do it while you can still change your number.

What not to do

• Do not forward the report to the agent with a worried note. It is the weakest possible opening.
• Do not accept a free damp survey from a company that sells damp-proofing. It is a sales visit. Our damp and rot guides explain what to check first — the external ground level relative to the damp-proof course settles a surprising number of these for the price of an afternoon with a spade.
• Do not price everything. Costing the kitchen and the decorating alongside the roof makes your schedule look like a wish list and invites the seller to dismiss all of it.
• Do not sit on it for three weeks. The time is there to use, but a long silence reads to the other side as "the RICS survey found nothing".
• Do not treat amber as a to-do list for year one. Rating 2 findings are what a normal house looks like. Spread them across a decade.

If you would rather somebody else did the triage

This is what the £59 review is. You send the report; a working builder goes through every finding, tells you which are genuinely urgent, which are the normal wear of a house of that age, and what each one realistically costs — plus a view on what is worth taking back to the agent and what is not. Written report and a call, back within 24 hours.

If it is one question rather than a whole report — is this crack serious, is this quote sensible, should I be worried about that phrase — ask it free. No card, no obligation.

The report is a health check, not a bill. What it cannot do is tell you which findings matter to you, at this price, with the money you have left after completion. That part is a judgement, and it is much easier to make once somebody has put honest numbers against the list.