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The Home Report

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The Home Report

Almost every home in Scotland must be marketed with a Home Report, paid for by the seller and available to any serious buyer before a single offer is made. It is one of the few things Scotland does in house buying that England and Wales tried, abandoned, and are now consulting on reintroducing. It is also the subject of more confidently wrong published guidance than any other document in Scottish conveyancing.

RFPublished by Rooney Family Law Limited, solicitors, regulated by the Law Society of Scotland · Last reviewed 14th August 2026

What a Home Report actually is

A Home Report is a package of information about a house, prepared before the house is advertised, and given to anyone who asks for it. The point of it is to move the survey to the front of the transaction rather than the back. A Scottish buyer decides what to offer already knowing what a chartered surveyor thinks the property is worth and what is wrong with it. An English or Welsh buyer commits to a price first and finds out afterwards.

The Scottish Government, and almost everybody else, describes the Home Report as three documents.

The Single Survey. A visual inspection by a chartered surveyor. It records the condition of the property, graded by repair category, gives the surveyor’s opinion of market value, estimates the cost of rebuilding the property for insurance purposes, and includes accessibility information — whether there are steps to the front door, whether a wheelchair could get through the doorways, and so on. The accessibility audit is a section within the Single Survey rather than a separate document.

The Energy Report. The Energy Performance Certificate rating, estimated running costs for heating, lighting and hot water, carbon emissions, and recommendations for improvement.

The Property Questionnaire. Completed by the seller rather than by a surveyor, covering sixteen categories of information: the council tax band, past flooding or storm damage, alterations and whether consents were obtained, guarantees, notices affecting the property, parking arrangements and the rest.

A point of precision that almost no competing page makes

The regulations do not prescribe three documents. Regulation 4 of the Housing (Scotland) Act 2006 (Prescribed Documents) Regulations 2008 prescribes two: a survey report, which must itself carry the energy efficiency information, and a property questionnaire. The three-document description is the Scottish Government’s way of presenting the same package, and it is the description everybody uses, including us. It matters only if you are ever arguing about what was or was not provided.

Who prepares it, and who pays

The seller pays. The statutory duty falls on the person responsible for marketing the house, which in an ordinary sale means the seller and the seller’s estate agent, and the cost is the seller’s.

The Single Survey must be prepared by a surveyor registered with, or authorised to practise by, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. The Property Questionnaire is completed by the seller, or by somebody the seller authorises.

There is a common misdescription here worth correcting. You will read that surveyors must be “on the Home Report register”. There is no Home Report register. What regulation 5 requires is RICS registration or authorisation, which is a different and broader thing.

A prospective buyer who asks for a copy must be given one within nine days, free of charge. There is a narrow qualification: the seller need not comply with a request from somebody they reasonably believe is unlikely to have the means to buy the property, or is not genuinely interested in buying it. That exists to stop nosy neighbours, not to filter buyers, and it does not apply to trading standards officers.

How long a Home Report lasts — the question everybody asks, and the answer most guides get wrong

This is the most searched question about Home Reports and it is answered badly almost everywhere. You will find pages telling you a Home Report is valid for twelve weeks. You will find other pages telling you that the twelve-week figure is a myth, that it is merely a lender convention, and that a Home Report has no legal expiry date at all.

Both are wrong, because there are two separate rules operating on two separate clocks.

The statutory clock: twelve weeks to the market date

Regulation 6 of the 2008 Regulations provides:

The date to which information in a prescribed document relates must be no earlier than the date at the beginning of the period of 12 weeks before the date on which the house is put on the market (“the market date”).

So the twelve-week rule is real, it is statutory, and it bites at one specific moment: the day the property first goes on the market. A report already four months old on the day the advertisement appears does not comply.

What regulation 6 does not do is impose any continuing expiry. Once the property is on the market, the Act imposes no obligation to refresh the report, however long the property sits unsold. A house may be advertised for a year on its original Home Report without anybody breaching anything.

There is one further provision that catches people out. If the property is withdrawn from the market and put back, a withdrawal of four weeks or less at a time does not reset anything — the original market date continues to govern. It follows that a withdrawal longer than four weeks creates a fresh market date, at which the twelve-week test has to be satisfied again. That is the point at which a new or refreshed report stops being a lender’s preference and becomes a legal requirement.

The lender’s clock: about ninety days to the mortgage offer

Entirely separately, mortgage lenders apply their own rules, and those rules are lending criteria rather than law. They are also not uniform.

Nationwide’s published Scottish criteria state that Home Reports are valid for ninety days from and including the date of inspection until the mortgage offer is issued, and that where that window closes first, a replacement Home Report is required — which Nationwide will not obtain and will not fund. NatWest’s intermediary guidance states that Home Reports are valid for three months, after which they may be refreshed for a further three. At least one Home Report provider reports that some lenders require an update at eight weeks.

The two clocks start and finish at different events, which is why the rule feels contradictory

The statutory clock runs backwards from the day the property is first advertised. The lender’s clock runs forwards from the day of inspection to the day the mortgage offer is issued. A report can be perfectly compliant with the law and useless to your lender on the same afternoon.

If you are buying, the practical question is never “is this Home Report still valid”. It is “will my lender accept this Home Report, and by when”. Ask your solicitor to put that question to the lender early, because the answer determines whether somebody has to pay for a refresh and, if so, who.

Refresh, and retype — two different things

A refresh, sometimes called a replacement, is where the original surveyor updates the Single Survey, including the valuation. The Energy Performance Certificate is not updated and the seller is not asked to complete a new Property Questionnaire. It can often be done without a full re-inspection and it typically costs around a third of the price of the original report. It is usually the buyer’s lender that asks for it, and there is no obligation on the seller to pay for one — which is a negotiation, and one worth having before it becomes urgent.

A retype, also called a transcription or transposition, is not an inspection at all. It is the exercise of copying the Home Report valuation onto the lender’s own valuation template so that it is addressed to the lender. Nationwide calls it a transcript; NatWest calls it transposing onto the NatWest template.

A refresh restarts the lender’s clock. It does not restart the statutory clock, because the statutory clock is fixed by the market date and is not re-applied while the property stays on the market.

The valuation, and what happens when you offer over

This is the part of the Home Report that costs people real money, and it is a conveyancing question rather than a surveying one.

The Single Survey gives the surveyor’s opinion of market value, expressed as a valuation for mortgage purposes. Lenders ordinarily rely on it, but not by simply reading the seller’s document. The lender obtains a transcription or transposition of the valuation onto its own template, and that is subject to conditions: the original surveyor generally has to be on the lender’s panel, the property has to fall within the categories the lender will transcribe for, and the report has to be recent enough. NatWest, for instance, excludes new builds, private sales, remortgages, buy to let and properties over one million pounds from transcription.

Then comes the point that catches out first-time buyers in a competitive market.

Your lender lends against the valuation, not against the price. If the Home Report values the property at £200,000 and you offer £220,000 to win it, the lender does not treat the property as being worth £220,000. It treats it as being worth £200,000. The £20,000 difference is not lent against at all. It has to come out of your own funds, on top of your deposit.

A worked example makes the scale of it obvious. On a property valued at £200,000, a buyer with a ten per cent deposit needs £20,000. If that buyer offers £230,000 to secure the property, the lender still lends against £200,000, so the buyer needs the £20,000 deposit plus the £30,000 excess: £50,000 in cash, not £23,000. Buyers routinely discover this after their offer has been accepted.

There is a second, quieter consequence. Loan to value is calculated against the valuation, so a buyer bidding well over the Home Report figure may find themselves in a worse interest rate band than the one they were quoted, because the loan is now a higher proportion of the value the lender recognises.

Work out your ceiling before you bid, not after

The number that matters is not what you have been approved to borrow. It is the Home Report valuation plus however much cash you have available above your deposit. In a closing date situation, where offers are submitted blind and there is no second chance, that arithmetic needs to have been done in advance. Your solicitor will do it with you in ten minutes.

What a Home Report costs in 2026

There is no statutory scale and no fixed fee. Price varies with the value of the property, its age and size, and how far the surveyor has to travel.

Published figures are harder to come by than one would expect: the three largest Scottish surveying firms all decline to publish a price list and quote on request.

A comparison guide updated on 3rd August 2026, drawing on data from seven Scottish providers, puts average Scottish spend at £433 including value added tax. A Glasgow firm of solicitors and estate agents publishes a broadly consistent range, describing typical cost as between £400 and £800, around £350 for a small flat and closer to £1,000 for a large detached house. One provider advertises reports from £200.

Two practical points. Check whether a quoted price includes VAT, because quoting conventions differ. And if you are selling, get more than one quotation: the spread within a single price band is wide enough to be worth ten minutes on the telephone.

When a Home Report is not needed

The regulations set out a list of exceptions, and there are two further situations that fall outside the requirement for a different reason.

The exceptions in the regulations cover: new housing, meaning a house never previously used as a house or as any other premises; newly converted premises, not previously used in their converted state; portfolios, where a house is sold together with others and the marketing makes clear that no offer for one alone will be accepted; seasonal and holiday accommodation, subject to a planning condition restricting occupation to less than eleven months in any twelve or to holiday use, where the marketing says so; mixed sales, where a house is sold with ancillary non-residential premises and will not be sold separately; dual use properties used for both residential and non-residential purposes and marketed accordingly; unsafe properties, unoccupied and in a condition posing a serious risk to health or safety, marketed as unsuitable for occupation; and properties to be demolished, where the relevant consents for demolition and the planning permission for redevelopment are already in place.

Two further situations sit outside the duty because the duty never arises. The requirement bites only where a house is “on the market”, meaning the fact that it is or may become available has been made public in Scotland by or on behalf of the seller. So a genuinely private sale that is never advertised — a sale agreed between family members, for instance — needs no Home Report. The same reasoning explains why a right to buy purchase by a sitting tenant does not need one: it is not publicly marketed. Different information requirements apply to a right to buy sale instead.

The duty also applies only where the house is available for sale with vacant possession.

An auction sale is not an exception. There is no auction exemption anywhere in the regulations, and a property advertised in an auction catalogue has been made public by or on behalf of the seller. The requirement applies.

One thing that survives every exemption: an Energy Performance Certificate is still required even where a Home Report is not. That obligation comes from separate regulations and an EPC is valid for ten years.

What happens if a seller does not provide one

Enforcement sits with local authority trading standards services, which are the enforcement authorities for this Part of the Act. If you ask for a Home Report and do not receive it within nine days, the council’s trading standards service is where the complaint goes.

An authorised officer may issue a penalty charge notice where they believe a duty has been breached. The penalty is £500, which is both the amount prescribed by regulations and the statutory ceiling, so it cannot rise without an amendment to the Act itself. There are twenty-eight days to pay, a right to request a review by the enforcement authority, and an appeal to the sheriff.

Note the vocabulary, because it is often reported wrongly. This is a penalty charge, not a fine. The only fine in this Part of the Act is for obstructing an enforcement officer, which is a different offence altogether.

Why England and Wales have nothing like it

England and Wales did have something like it. Home Information Packs were introduced under Part 5 of the Housing Act 2004 and required a seller to assemble information up front in much the same way.

They were suspended on 20th May 2010 and repealed outright with effect from 15th January 2012. The Energy Performance Certificate requirement survived; everything else went. Scotland kept its version, which had begun on 1st December 2008, and it has run continuously since.

The practical consequence for anybody moving between the two jurisdictions is real. A buyer in England commits to a price and then commissions a survey, which is why English offers are routinely made subject to survey and why English sales collapse at the survey stage far more often than Scottish ones do. A Scottish buyer has the surveyor’s condition report and valuation in hand before deciding what to offer.

It is worth adding that the United Kingdom Government is currently consulting on home buying and selling reform in England and Wales, including mandatory upfront information and seller surveys. Nothing is in force, and the direction of travel is towards what Scotland already has.

How to actually read one

Three things are worth more attention than the rest.

The repair categories. The Single Survey grades elements of the property by the urgency of repair. A category three finding is not a detail — it means urgent repair or replacement is needed. Read the categories before the valuation, because they are what the valuation is built on.

The valuation, against the asking price. In Scotland properties are commonly advertised at “offers over” a figure below the valuation, and sometimes at a fixed price above it. Compare the two consciously rather than assuming any relationship between them.

The Property Questionnaire. It is completed by the seller, not by a professional, and it is the part of the Home Report where alterations without building warrant, past flooding, or a notice affecting the property will first appear. If something in it is unclear or incomplete, that is a question for your solicitor before you offer, not after.

Sources

This page explains the law in general terms and is not advice on your own transaction. It states the position as at 15th August 2026. Lender requirements are set by each lender individually and change without notice; the figures for Nationwide and NatWest are taken from their published criteria and should be checked against the lender you are actually using. Costs are market figures and are not fixed by anyone. Take advice from your own solicitor before acting.