Two surveys, opposite answers.

A property can be beautiful, brilliantly located and a bad buy all at once — and it can look suspiciously good and be a genuinely sound one. The charm and the condition are separate questions, and the listing only ever sells you the first. Here are two real jobs that landed on opposite sides of that line: one we told a nervous buyer to go ahead on, and one we told them to walk away from. Details anonymised; the numbers are real.

The house we told them to buy

Renovated detached house, Boavista. Grade B+. Verdict: buy — and the €3,000–€5,900 snag list took more than that off the price.

A nervous buyer asked us to look over a three-floor Boavista house, recently renovated and presenting beautifully. They’d been told “always find the problems before you buy” and frankly didn’t trust how good it looked. The truth was: it was good. Plumbing pressure strong across all three floors, bathrooms well executed, window sealing effective, no structural distress anywhere, and even the basement presented well — uncommon in Porto. This wasn’t a place dressed up to sell; it had been done properly. The real items were all external water management and none of them structural: a garden bed built hard against the front façade acting as a permanent wet sponge; a rear studio with a musty smell traced to external gravel sitting too high at the threshold; a roof junction with the neighbour that needed monitoring, not panic. We costed the lot of preventative works at roughly €3,000–€5,900 and — just as importantly — told them how to use it: a measured, evidenced price adjustment, not an accusation, because the house was well renovated and the vendor knew it. They bought it, at a better price, with their eyes open. Sometimes the truth is “this is a good house, here’s the short list, now go and take more off the price than the survey cost you.”

The apartment I’d have walked away from

Historic-centre studio, around €250,000, bought for short-let. Grade C+. Verdict: renegotiate hard or walk — because nobody had looked at the roof.

On paper it was the dream: a pre-1940 granite building, high ceilings, good light, a perfect location for AL. You walk in and it presents beautifully; most people would have signed that week. But the water was real. Around the main window there was swollen joinery and split architraves — the kind of swelling you only get from prolonged, repeated wetting. The timber floor beneath was black-stained, and the stone reveals had live mould blooming in the corners. Active and ongoing, not a historic mark painted over once. The condominium had already “looked into” the damp and decided it was the façade and the windows. They had not inspected the roof. And the roof told a different story: from outside, newer red tiles patched in among old moss-covered ones, heavy biological growth on the stone eaves, and — the giveaway — matching staining carrying onto the neighbour’s side of the junction. That is chronic saturation at roof level, not a leaky window frame. In a condominium the roof isn’t yours to simply fix; it needs collective agreement and collective funding, paid through the permilagem. So I graded it C+ and gave a deliberately wide repair range — a few thousand euros into five figures — because nobody had inspected the roof. The most dangerous report is a confident wrong one. Before you believe “it’s just the windows,” ask the simplest question there is: has anyone actually looked at the roof?

The point

Same builder, same week, opposite advice — and that’s exactly what an independent survey is for. We don’t earn anything on whether you buy, so the verdict is whatever the building actually deserves: go ahead and negotiate, or walk and keep your deposit. If you’ve found a property, that’s the work we do — the pre-purchase survey tells you which one you’re looking at, with real numbers, while you still have the leverage to act on it. And if it needs work, we’re the builder who can put it right, not just the one who finds it.

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