For all the attention given to finance, legal work and transaction times, there’s a danger that one crucial part of homebuying reform gets overlooked, the property itself.

Any given property, especially a home, is not simply a collection of data points to be added to a sales pack and passed between systems. Its age, construction, condition and history can all affect the buyer’s plans, the advice they receive and the lender’s assessment of risk. Unless this information is available early and interpreted properly, a faster process will not necessarily be a better one.

This is why upfront home condition surveys should play a central role in the government’s proposed changes. They can bring qualified professional insight into the transaction before an offer leads to significant financial and emotional commitment, giving buyers and those supporting them a firmer basis for the decisions that follow. It’s also vital that we have right consumer protection in terms of regulation and that will only be achieved through RICS and RICS qualified surveyors.

However, placing a survey at the beginning of the process is only the first step. The industry must decide what it should cover and how its findings will be shared. It must also retain a clear distinction between a home condition survey, which helps the buyer understand the property, and a mortgage valuation carried out for the lender.

As outlined in a recent Mortgage Strategy article by Andrew Vaughan, head of customer management at e4 Strategic, Open Banking offers a useful lesson. Its progress depended not merely on making data available, but on agreeing standards that allowed organisations to use it with confidence. Homebuying faces a similar task, although the comparison only goes so far and the condition of individual properties brings questions that cannot always be answered through data alone.

Two homes of the same age and type may appear similar on paper but require very different assessments once their construction, alterations, maintenance and local environment are considered. A structured data field may confirm when a property was built or what materials were used, but it cannot always explain what a crack, patch of damp or roof defect means in practice. That interpretation requires professional judgement, which is why the role of the surveyor remains so important.

Of course, the home condition survey is only one link in a complex homebuying chain. Each party has a different responsibility, so the answer is not to make one report serve every purpose. It is to identify which findings can be shared and used safely, where further investigation is needed and how responsibility remains clear throughout.

This matters to brokers because property condition can quickly become a mortgage issue. A survey may identify repairs that alter the buyer’s plans, prompt a renegotiation or require specialist reports before the lender can proceed. When those matters appear late, the broker is often left helping the client reassess their borrowing needs at a point when costs have already been incurred and expectations are firmly set.

Bringing professional insight forward creates the chance to have those conversations at a more useful stage. It could help buyers form their offers with a fuller understanding of the home, allow brokers to help them consider the financial effect of any required work and give other parties more time to respond where further action is needed.

For this to work, the report must be more than another document within an expanded sales pack. There needs to be agreement over who commissions it, how long it remains current and what happens when repairs are carried out or the property remains on the market for some time. Buyers must also understand what the survey tells them and where its limits lie.

The government’s proposals offer a real opportunity to improve the homebuying process from start to finish, but success cannot be judged by speed alone. A quicker transaction that leaves buyers poorly informed about the property would address only part of the problem.

So, let’s hope that any homebuying reform keeps the property at the forefront of every conversation, with upfront surveys recognised as a pivotal part of helping people make better-informed decisions.

Matthew Cumber is managing director at Countrywide Surveying Services