A survey written for landlords, not just buyers. The RPSA Buy to Let Survey reports the condition of the building and reviews the health-and-safety matters that affect your tenants — considered against all 29 HHSRS hazard profiles — in one plain-English report. It protects the investment and the people in it. Kent, Sussex, Surrey and London.
When you buy a home to live in, a survey answers one question: is the building sound, and what will it cost me? When you buy a home to let, you take on a second set of questions the ordinary survey never asks — because you now owe a legal duty to keep other people safe in it. A slipped handrail, an over-hot flat under a warm roof, a badly guarded window, a failing extract fan breeding mould: these are not just repair items, they are the exact hazards a local authority can act on, and the exact things a tenant’s claim can be built from.
The RPSA Buy to Let Survey is designed for precisely that. It gives you everything a standard Home Condition Survey does — the state of the roof, walls, services, drainage and the rest, element by element, colour-coded and photographed — and then adds a landlord-specific layer on top: a review of the property against the safety framework councils actually use.
This is not a council HHSRS inspection. The survey considers the property against the 29 HHSRS hazard profiles and tells you where the risks are — but it does not produce the formal numerical hazard score that an environmental health officer calculates for enforcement purposes. Think of it as the landlord’s own early-warning system: it finds the problems before a tenant complaint or a council notice does, and gives you the evidence and the plan to put them right. That is exactly where it earns its money.
A rental has to meet the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standard (MEES) — currently EPC E, with the standard set to rise to C for the private rented sector later this decade. Because I’m a domestic energy assessor as well as a surveyor, I can produce the EPC on the same visit as the survey, and flag where the property sits against MEES now and where it’s heading. Where a home is below standard or needs work to get there, that ties straight into retrofit planning — the same fabric-first thinking, done by the same person who saw the building.
I inspect the property in person — roof space, services, drainage, every accessible element — and work through the HHSRS hazard profiles as I go. The visit typically takes a couple of hours depending on the size and age of the property. You get the written report, the separate DASH hazard review, and a conversation about what it all means and what I’d prioritise. Plain English throughout; no jargon you have to decode.
I’m based in Hartfield, East Sussex, and carry out Buy to Let Surveys across Kent, Sussex, Surrey and the London fringe — including Tunbridge Wells, Sevenoaks, Tonbridge, East Grinstead, Crowborough, Uckfield, Crawley, Horsham and the surrounding towns and villages.
Postcode, age and type, and whether you’re buying it, already letting it, or dealing with a problem. You’ll have a fixed fee, a date and a clear scope inside one working day — usually within hours. If a full Building Survey would serve you better, I’ll say so.