Building and condition surveys
Building survey appthat reports as you walk.
A condition survey is a building's worth of rooms, each with its own fabric, services, defects and photographs. Capture the plan as you walk it, record each room against it, and the report writes itself from the survey rather than from your notes about the survey.
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64
Rooms
9
Elements
1
Report
One floor of a building condition survey
The survey takes a day. The report takes three.
Room dimensions in a notebook, condition in shorthand, defects in a camera roll, and then days of assembling all of it into a document. The bottleneck was never the surveying — it is everything that happens between leaving site and issuing the report.
Measurements taken twice
Once on site with a laser, again into a spreadsheet, with a transcription error somewhere in between.
Photographs that need sorting
Hundreds of images that have to be matched back to rooms from memory before they can be used.
Inconsistent room records
When each room is written up freehand, no two rooms in the report describe the same things.
Capture the building, not the notebook.
Every room recorded the same way.
Consistency is what makes a condition survey usable — by the client, by the next surveyor, and by whoever prices the work. Structured capture per room gives you that without slowing the walk down.
✓Floor plans captured on site
Walk the rooms and build the plan as you go, so spaces exist to record against from the first visit.
✓Structured condition per room
Rate the same elements in every room, so the survey can be compared, filtered and totalled afterwards.
✓Photographs pinned to spaces
Images attach to the room they were taken in, which removes the sorting job entirely.
✓Measure on the image
Record a dimension against the photograph itself where a written measurement would lose its context.
✓Voice notes transcribed
Talk through a room while your hands are busy and get the text back against the record.
✓Report from the survey
The document is generated from what was captured, rather than assembled from notes afterwards.
Start from a condition survey template.
Open the ready-made building survey form, set the elements and ratings your practice uses, and run it room by room.
✓Property, floor and room reference
✓Room dimensions and use
✓Floor, wall and ceiling condition
✓Windows, doors and joinery
✓Services, heating and lighting
✓Defects with photograph and priority
✓Condition rating and recommended action
What is a building survey app?+
A building survey app is used to carry out a condition or fabric survey on a mobile device. The surveyor captures the building's spaces, records the condition of each room against a consistent set of elements, and attaches photographs to the room as they go. Because the record is structured, the survey report can be produced from the captured data rather than written from notes afterwards.
Can floor plans be captured on site?+
Yes. Spaces can be captured as you walk the building, so rooms exist to record against on the first visit without waiting for drawings. Where a layout already exists it can be used instead.
How are photographs kept in order?+
Each image attaches to the room it was taken in and, where relevant, to the specific defect. That removes the job of matching hundreds of camera roll images back to rooms from memory, which is usually the slowest part of writing a survey up.
Can several surveyors work on the same building?+
Yes. A large building can be split by floor or wing across a team, with everyone capturing into the same survey record, so the report covers the whole property without anyone merging spreadsheets.
Is this suitable for repeat condition surveys of the same estate?+
Yes. Because rooms and their records persist, a later survey adds to the same spaces rather than starting again, which is what makes stock condition work across an estate manageable over several years.
Does it work in empty buildings with no connectivity?+
Yes. Surveys are captured on the device and sync when connectivity returns, which covers empty properties, basements and rural sites where there is no usable signal.
Go deeper
Guides and tools behind this workflow.
See it on your next job