ridiculous survey costs

3 weeks ago in Cowes for a 45ft 1998 boat was £850. I was there all day, but not standing over him.
 
capnsensible said:
There are many threads complaining about things that people are unable to do themselves..
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I could do a survey but the insurance company requires a "professional". I don't see why they don't just give a digital form which can be populated with info and pics. Would have saved me spending Euro 750 on an idiot.

Another ps: the idiot added a bit in his survey suggesting that I install marelon seacocks. He didn't notice that they already all were.
 
steve yates said:
At the end of the day, it depends if they are thorough & good, A good surveyor at £850 could be value for money, a poor one at £500 an utter waste of cash.
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I agree.

It is not something to get done solely on price. As someone once told me, in relation to something completely different, you have to decide what precisely is it you want, then whether you can afford it, rather than just think what can you (or want to) afford. Otherwise you run a serious risk of getting something that doesn't actually do the job yet have shelled out money for and are no further ahead. Then if your budget doesn't provide what you wanted, you are consciously amending your budget or your expectations (if either of those are possibilities), or the intention as a whole. Too much of both goods and services, I feel, is done solely on price these days (and i am on a tighter budget than most on here).

It is a challenge to identify which are the good surveyors (on both skills and service) - word of mouth (the YBW forums are helpful here) is about all we have to separate the wheat from the chaff- and often times one is forced by circumstances to take the luck of the draw.

I am lucky to have had mostly good advice and acceptable service from the surveyors I have used, but I am aware of some being very poor. I have found most useful the ability to review a draft of the survey report, and suggest amendments, not to challenge the surveyor's opinion but to point out factual errors, request clarification of advice, or avoid unnecessarily specific and problematic recommendations (when there were also other, potentially better/simpler/cheaper, remedies available), and instead to identify the problem needing to be resolved, and give any suggested solutions as examples rather than prescriptions (which are then always translated into requirements by insurers).

For example, a boat i was buying had teak slat panels sitting on the on the GRP cockpit seats, held in place simply by gravity and rubber mounting pads for grip. The surveyor was concerned that these could potentially slide out of place when heeled or awkwardly trod on, fair enough, and recommended these were drilled and bolted down to the cockpit benches before the boat was launched. The cockpit benches were balsa cored, so bolting them down was not that simple, and one panel would have had to be redesigned and rebuilt as several as it covered and extended beyond a large lifting cockpit locker lid and a gas locker lid (originally accessed simply by lifting the slatted panel off). In practice, once the recommendation was amended to elimination of the potential slippage hazard, which the surveyor was content to do, we simply took the teak panels off and put them in the loft! (We'd intended to tackle the problem at the end of the first season, I pondered various designs that would hold them laterally in place, but by that time we'd forgotten about the teak slat panels until we moved house, by which time we were very satisfied by the comfort and practicality of the GRP seats, so they went back in the new loft until the boat was sold. We'd also met in the interim an owner of the same model who was faced with gruesome task of replacing the balsa core of his cockpit seats because a previous owner ('or perhaps even those who'd built his yard finished boat) had simply screwed teak slats into the GRP surface of the seats, exposing the balsa core to water ingress.)

I also had something (I can't remember exactly what) which was helpfully suggested by a surveyor as helping ensure the long term durability of the boat, but which was not urgent and would have been time consuming and expensive to do at the distance the boat I was buying was then lying. When pointed out to the surveyor he was happy to move it out of the list of requirements before launching and instead in the final report he recommend it to be done when next lifted, or within a year, or somesuch.

More generally on surveyor quality, in one case when buying I was partly relying on a copy of a survey done just weeks before for another potential purchaser who had pulled out for a seemingly unrelated reason, knowing full well I didn't have the legal 'benefit' of the survey. That surveyor may have known his onions in regard to boat construction for all I could tell, but was incapable of expressing himself clearly in English (or perhaps even thinking clearly), so the report was garbled, vague and of limited practical use: e.g. a part of the electrical system was identified as wrongly installed and needing correction, without saying what he thought was wrong with it or how it should be different. Fortunately I also had the benefit of an excellent thorough, clear and detailed survey report done 10 years earlier on the same boat, with the same questioned arrangement, by a different surveyor (who actually taught surveying and wrote an apparently well regarded textbook on the subject) who had no quibble about the system in question and had actually included a photo of it. (I also had to help me on that purchase decision a very experienced boatbuilder acquaintance who had newly also qualified as a surveyor, who kindly gave the boat an informal quick look over and pronounced I wasn't buying a lemon, but who even in his brief inspection of the fundamentals had picked up a potentially important issue the recent surveyor had completely missed.)
 
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The insurers of my 45 year old Fireball require a professional survey this year. I seriously doubt that there are many marine surveyors who will have the slightest clue what they are looking at.
 
I’ve been on the wrong end of a lazy, stupid surveyor. Charged like a wounded rhino and the result was shockingly poor.
I’ve also been on the right end of a good one. Gave me some sensible advice on the hull and didn’t charge a penny.
A bottle was sent.
Only advice I have is to talk to them and to the yard
 
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barca nova said:
just been quoted £800 so survey a modern 32 foot sailboat. The survey that I had for my previous similar boat in 2023 was < £500. Seems to me that £800 for half a days work is wildly excessive and I dont see any reason at all for the ;level of increases.

What have you paid recently? Solent / south coast area
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Nick Vass ( Omega ) was £450 for my 34 ft 1979 Long keeled ketch
barca nova said:
just been quoted £800 so survey a modern 32 foot sailboat. The survey that I had for my previous similar boat in 2023 was < £500. Seems to me that £800 for half a days work is wildly excessive and I dont see any reason at all for the ;level of increases.

What have you paid recently? Solent / south coast area
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try Nick Vass Omega Yacht Services ( central Solent) very experienced surveyor was £450 last week for my 1979 long keeled ketch.
 
I am now retired from surveying but for a 32' yacht I would be looking at around £550- £600 max, I have never done the actual survey in less than a day most 09.00 to 17.00 plus best part of another day writing up the survey which on average would be around 30 pages

Never ask the boatyard you are buying from for a recommendation but ask around for recommendations as like everything else there are good and poor surveyors and you gets what you pay for
 
I was interested in a wooden ex lifeboat around 15 years ago, I arranged for a local wooden boat surveyor to do the job. The boat looked amazing to my amateur eye, all painted nice, which I guess is a red flag. After around 4 hours the surveyor takes a lunch break.

After more crawling around he emerged from the depths of the bilges and said follow me, I crawled with him to the weed hatch just above the prop. This area was rotting away.
Apparently because it's so difficult to get to its forgotten. Repairs to this area would be around 30k because it involves taking the wheelhouse and deck out to access the area.
He said to run away as fast as I could.
His fee was money well spent.
 
Wansworth said:
Yes I heard he was good
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I knew Nick when he started surveying work, based on experience working with Hurley in his youth. He’d be my first choice buying a boat on the central South Coast but I wouldn’t want him surveying a boat I was selling!

I used Paul Kerridge to buy in Falmouth in 2016 and he was excellent in working with Red Ensign, the selling agents, to get remedial work done before the sale was completed. I was 4 hrs drive away, with no knowledge of local contractors and the sellers were abroad so it needed good agents in both sides to complete the sale.

Whoever did the survey on the same boat for sale ashore in Plymouth last September spent at least 5 hrs on board, made an amazing number of scrapes of the antifoul to try to find damp, but failed, and for reasons unbeknown left the boat with the solar panel control switched off. 4 hrs away and having a chemo and a major op it was only last week I got down to the boat to find 430 amph of battery capacity totally flat and refusing to hold a charge. Another several hundreds of pounds spent. The buyer didn’t follow through on the purchase, but the only recommendations the surveyor made were minor and would have been rectified before completion. He managed to leave both buyer and seller worse off, so I hope he didn’t charge much.
 
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I used Toby Lester and was really happy with both his attention to detail, cost and quality of the report, he is based in Kent but has just done a pre-purchase survey for my friend for a boat in the Portsmouth area and he only charged petrol money for the travelling (he had done surveys for them before).
 
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