What Does 2021 Bring?

This coming year brings with it some challenges for the world following the disaster that was 2020 but there are some interesting changes for the surveying world in 2021 and how we will all do things we will start with Home Heroes Limited and then finish with the industry in general.

Home Heroes Limited

We will continue to invest in the best technology and tools to allow us to offer the best and most efficient service possible.

• Drone Roofing Surveys increasing due to a change in the Drone Laws
• Web Hosting, this site will be moved to a VPS with plenty of resources to grow as well some of our other sites making it even faster and more efficient for our visitors.
• Additional Equipment, We will continue to innovate and adapt to new ways of working, we’ve introduced google meet after inspection conversations for those that want them and have done defect works and consultation from photos too in 2020.
• We will launch a few additional specialist websites for some of our services some of which we have owned for years such as Heritage.consulting which will focus on our historic building services and the services we can offer.
• CPD and Training we will continue to train and add CPD to our services to make us the best possible surveyors.

Diagrams and Images

This image has been around for years and the labelled version features in most building surveyors report. I believe it was originally created by the RICS for the original home surveys product, we continue to find diagrams and sketches all over the internet which we are updating and adding to our library of sketches to include in our articles and reports. The image below has been highlighted for a redraw, to allow us to add additional items to it including Solar Panels, Heat Pumps and MVHR systems.

Home Survey Standards

This has been pushed back since June 2020, which is when we began implementing the terminology and other items into our services, but the replacement of the old survey types Home Condition, Homebuyers and Building survey with the Level 1, Level 2, Level 3 survey standards will continue this is currently now scheduled for 1st March 2021 and we expect there to be a few tweaks to the services going forward to mimic anything contained within the new release information.

This delay has caused some issues for us but we expect it will eventually launch in 2021

Drone use in Surveying

As mentioned above and in its dedicated blog post I expect many changes to drone surveys in 2021, mainly to the change in legislation and registration. I plan on undertaking the training to become a qualified drone pilot specifically for roofing surveys and I imagine they will become another tool in a lot of surveyors toolkits in due course.

Reporting Standards and Survey Reports

I am pretty proud that in the last year we compiled our own survey format, taking what we felt where the best bits of every survey product we could buy, its not original but this allows us to change it as needed to accommodate the survey being undertaken and we don’t need to blindly follow. I expect more surveyors to follow this route in 2021 with the new home survey standards.

I also expect something else we do “Digital Delivery as Standard” to become more common in 2021, we’ve printed a single report in 2019 and ZERO in 2020 if only we could get the same level of digital service for party wall documents but this is proving much harder to get traction for.

Digital Delivery as standard has so many benefits to printed including the ability to Zoom into high definition photos and to interact with the report easier.