RICS Chartered Surveyors in Harrogate

The ground beneath the spa town and the stone above it

Harrogate stands on Millstone Grit, the thick Carboniferous sandstones that run north from the Pennine edge, and the town exists at all because that rock is faulted here. Mineral water rises through the fractures and reaches the surface as sulphur and chalybeate springs, which is why there is a Royal Pump Room at the foot of the hill and a well head under a canopy in Valley Gardens. The fault itself is rarely the surveyor's concern. What matters is that the sandstone gives generally firm founding, so movement in Harrogate houses tends to be local rather than regional: a settled bay, a cracked corner above a broken gully, a lintel that has dropped over a wide opening made by somebody who did not replace what they took out.

The building stone is a hard, even grained gritstone, dressed as ashlar on the principal elevations of the better houses and left as coursed rubble at the sides and the rear where nobody was expected to look. That distinction governs how a wall should be repaired. Ashlar has fine joints that were never intended to carry a broad band of mortar, so a mason who points a villa frontage the way he would point rubble work leaves the elevation looking permanently coarse and traps water behind the face of every block. Roofs are the other clear departure from the mill towns to the west. The railway arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century and brought Welsh slate with it, so the standard covering here is thin slate on comparatively slender rafters rather than heavy sandstone flags. Slate fails quietly, by corrosion of the nails and by delamination at the tail, and a roof that reads as tidy from the pavement can be close to the end of its life.

Knaresborough, four miles east, sits on entirely different rock. The Nidd has cut a gorge through Magnesian Limestone there, and the houses that step down the cliff above the river are among the more interesting buildings we are asked to inspect. Several have rooms or stores cut into the rock itself, terraced gardens held up by retaining walls of real height, and a legal boundary that takes in a length of cliff face. On those properties the survey looks as hard at the ground, the retaining structures and where the rainwater goes as it does at the house, and the report says plainly which of them the owner is responsible for maintaining.

Villas divided into flats, and what you are actually buying

More of Harrogate's large houses have been converted than have not. A villa built for one family and two servants is an expensive thing to keep, and from the middle of the last century onwards hundreds of them were divided. Along Cornwall Road, Otley Road, Harlow Moor Drive and the roads behind them, a single address can now hold anything from two apartments to eight, and the quality of the conversion work spans everything from careful to appalling.

When you buy one of those flats the surveyor inspects your own accommodation and every part of the common areas that can be reached, then comments on the condition of the whole building. That is not padding. The roof, the stacks, the gutters, the stonework, the stair window and the drains are all things you will pay to put right through the service charge even though you own none of them. On a building of this size the sums are not trivial. Recovering a four storey slate roof and renewing the leadwork with it is a project in its own right, and divided eight ways it is still a substantial bill for each flat.

So the report sets out what your solicitor has to establish before exchange. Who holds the freehold, and is it a company the leaseholders themselves control. How many years are left on the lease and what exactly does the service charge buy. Is there a reserve fund, and does its balance bear any relation to the work the building will need in the next decade. Was the conversion itself ever signed off, because many of the earlier ones were carried out before anyone thought hard about fire separation between flats or sound insulation between floors, and the consequences pass to whoever owns the flat now.

The lower ground floor deserves separate treatment. In a Harrogate villa this was the kitchen and service level, set partly below the outside ground with a light well to the front. Converted, it is usually the cheapest flat in the building and very often the dampest, because the original ventilation has been sealed up, the light well drains slowly and the ground outside has crept upwards through a century of resurfacing. It can make a perfectly good home. What it needs is an inspection on its own terms and a report that identifies what is actually wetting the wall, rather than a recommendation for a chemical injection and nothing further.

Defects we see most in Harrogate homes

The pattern in this town follows from the stone, the slate and the subdivision. These are the findings our reports name most often.

• Cement mortar spread across the fine joints of ashlar frontages, holding water behind the face of the stone and impossible to remove later without chipping the edge of every block.
• Nail corrosion and slipped slates on Welsh slate roofs, usually disguised by a run of patch repairs and by mortar fillets at the abutments where a lead flashing should be.
• Chimney stacks on converted villas that have never been repaired above roof level, with open flues to disused fireplaces drawing damp air down through the building.
• Persistent damp in lower ground floor flats where the light well drains slowly, the airbricks have been blocked and the external ground now stands above the internal floor.
• Absent or token fire separation between flats in older conversions, particularly in roof voids that run uninterrupted from one end of the building to the other.
• Decayed sash joinery on south and west elevations, where the paint film has broken at the bottom rail and the sill and water has reached the end grain.
• Settlement under bay windows on shallow Victorian footings, which more often than not traces back to a leaking gully or a fractured drain within a metre of the wall.
• Felt covered flat roofs over later rear extensions and dormers, laid decades ago and now the most likely source of a ceiling stain in an otherwise sound house.

Buying, valuing and timing in Harrogate

Much of central Harrogate lies within a conservation area, and so do the villa roads on the Duchy side and the frontages facing the Stray. Inside one, the alterations that make an old house cheaper to run may all have needed consent that a previous owner never sought: replacement windows in plastic, a new front door of the wrong pattern, panels on a prominent roof slope, a front garden turned over to parking. Where we find work of that kind the report raises it, because unauthorised alteration becomes the buyer's difficulty on completion rather than the seller's. The same applies to the town's listed buildings, of which there are a good many.

The valuation work here sits alongside the surveys and is frequently the more delicate instruction. A probate valuation has to produce a defensible open market figure at the date of death, because the executors will enter that number in the inheritance tax account and may have to stand behind it afterwards. A matrimonial valuation has to be impartial enough that two people who agree on nothing else can both rely on it, and where the court requires it we prepare the report as a single joint expert. A private valuation is simpler in form and no less careful in substance, whether it is for a transfer between family members, for tax planning or to test a figure somebody has put in front of you. None of them reports on condition. Where you need the number and the faults together, a Level 2 Homebuyer Survey carries a valuation within it.

Evidence is what separates a valuation from an opinion, and Harrogate makes that harder than it looks. Genuinely comparable houses are scarce here. A stone villa on one side of a road can be a different proposition from its neighbour once you allow for an attic conversion, a strip of garden sold off in the 1970s, a Stray frontage or the lack of one, and a coach house at the bottom of the plot. The valuer's job is to find the transactions that really do compare, adjust them openly rather than silently, and set the reasoning down so the figure can be tested by somebody else.

On purchases, instruct as soon as your offer is accepted and your solicitor has the file. Family houses at Pannal, Burn Bridge and Killinghall and anything fronting the Stray move quickly, and a week lost at the beginning is a week you never recover at the end. We arrange access with the agent and ask for the loft hatch, the lower ground floor, the meter cupboards and any outbuildings to be open on the day. On a converted building we also ask for the common stair and, wherever it can be reached, the roof void, because that is where the honest answers generally are.

Other surveys and valuations we carry out around Harrogate

Beyond purchase surveys and valuations, clients in this district instruct us for structural engineer's reports where movement needs a cause rather than a description, timber and damp reports on older stone property, drone roof surveys where a tall villa roof cannot be seen safely from the ground, building insurance valuations for reinstatement cover, fire risk assessments on the common parts of converted houses and small blocks, energy performance certificates, asbestos surveys and boundary wall dispute reports. Knaresborough, Pannal, Killinghall, Spofforth and Burn Bridge are covered from the same diary as Harrogate itself, along with the villages between them.

There is also a great deal of small commercial space in this town, much of it consulting rooms, offices and shops inside converted houses. We prepare commercial building surveys on it, schedules of condition before a lease begins, dilapidations advice when one ends, commercial valuations and rent review reports. Our full list is on the Types of Survey page, and if the report you need is not obviously there, describe the problem on the phone and we will tell you which one answers it.