How to Read a Scottish Home Report: A Buyer's Guide
If you're buying in Scotland, every property you look at seriously should come with a Home Report — and it's usually the first genuinely useful document you get before you offer. It's also long, and written for surveyors, not buyers. Here's how it breaks down.
A Home Report has three parts:
The Single Survey. This is the core document — a room-by-room, element-by-element condition assessment (see our guide to what the Category ratings mean), plus the surveyor's valuation of the property. This valuation matters more than people realise: mortgage lenders use it, not the price you agree to pay, to decide how much they'll lend.
The Energy Report. This is the property's Energy Performance Certificate — current energy efficiency rating, potential rating if improvements were made, and an estimate of running costs. Useful for budgeting, rarely a dealbreaker.
The Property Questionnaire. Filled in by the seller, not a surveyor. It covers things a survey can't tell you: council tax band, factoring or shared repair arrangements (common in tenements and new estates), notices of alterations, disputes with neighbours, and whether specialist reports (damp, timber, structural) already exist. Buyers skip this section more than any other, and it's often where the most practically useful information is.
Where to actually start. Read the valuation first — and don't read the advertised price as the property's value. In Scotland an "offers over" figure is usually set deliberately below the Home Report valuation to attract competing bids, so the valuation, not the advert, is your reference point (more on that here). Then go straight to any Category 3 ratings in the Single Survey. Then the Property Questionnaire, specifically the factoring/common repairs and alterations questions. Everything else is worth reading, but those three things are what change your offer.
If you want the short version without wading through 50-plus pages yourself, Croft's free overview reads the whole report and surfaces exactly this — the valuation, the Category 3s, and the questions worth raising — in a couple of minutes.
Get the plain-English version of your report. Upload it for a free overview — no sign-up required.