Setting and Editing Prices

Site users are provided with comparitive quotes for "standardised" services such as the RICS Condition Report, RICS HomeBuyer, Building (Structural) Survey, and Valuation Surveys.

All other services are unpriced, and users when searching are simply provided with surveyor contact details.

Priced Services - Setting and Editing Prices

The site is pre-loaded with a default sample price matrix for each of the priced services.

This is split into two age bands (Pre 1940 and Post 1940) to differentiate between older houses, and those built post-war where new builds became more standardised.

The matrix is defined by size (bedrooms) and value. This provides scope for prices to be set either by size or value, providing flexibility for you to set prices based either on size or value, or a mix of both (the default).

Default Pricing

The default pricing for each service is based on the average price for the survey type offered on our site, including VAT. You may wish to continue with the default pricing (many surveyors are happy to start that way), or you are entirely free to set your own prices to suit your own practice or local market requirements.

For your convenience, and to get you started with the minimum of fuss, when you add a new service to an office the default price matrix for that service is loaded. But to prevent all surveyors that opt to stay with the default pricing showing the same price, a touch of "fuzzy logic" is applied to introduce some variation to each price in the matrix, both up and down.

Therefore your default prices will be slightly different to other surveyors offering the same service, so we do recommend reviewing the price matrix for your services to ensure they meet your needs.

To edit existing prices

Simply click on the individual prices in the matrix to select and change it. Use the 'Tab' key to step through each price. Once you have completed your changes, click "Save Prices" to save the updated matrix. There is no need to save after modifying each individual price.

NOTE: All prices must include VAT if applicable

It is important that the fees you offer on the site reflect your real pricing. One of the most common complaints we receive is surveyors not prepared to honour quoted fees. Although we accept that there may be some properties that do not fit the 'conventional construction' criteria, which may need to be priced differently, systematic underpricing on the site may result in account suspension.

Reset to default prices

You have the ability to reload the default prices for a service from the system defaults, or from another of your offices that offers the same service.

To reset prices to the system default prices for the current survey type, or to load a pricing matrix from another office which already offers the same service, select the relevant option from the "Load pricing from" dropdown, and click Load Prices to reload the price matrix.

Warning: If you attempt to load pricing from your currently selected office/service back into itself, the matrix will be deleted. To correct this, you should reload the website default and then reset your prices to suit.

Unpriced Services

There is no need to set pricing for unpriced services. Unpriced services by definition have no default pricing, so clicking on the Change Pricing link will simply display a notification that you cannot add pricing.

Priced and Unpriced Services

There are two service "types", Priced and Unpriced. Priced services are those services with a pre-defined "product" such as the RICS Homebuyer, Building Surveys, or Valuation Surveys. Where a service is priced, you have to add your pricing for the service, and site users will be shown comparitive quotes for the service in search results.

Unpriced services are those where there is no specific "product" to be compared, and therefore you do not need to add any prices, and site users are simply shown profiles and contact details in search results.

Fee Guide - Average Pricing Report

Check Average Fees by Survey, Bedrooms, Region and/or Postcode

The Average Fee Guide reporting tool is intended to help you set an appropriate level of fees for your local area.

We are very conscious of not wishing to exert any downward pressure on fees, but we are commonly asked about fee levels in an area, so we have created this reporting tool to help guide you in setting a realistic fee scale for your practice without the need to resort to carrying out any test searches.

Conversion rates are rarely solely down to price, and it is mostly down to three Ps: Place, Promptness, and Price. Local firms are favoured, and have an advantage, and following up leads promptly is also a major factor. Price is often the least important of these (provided you are not right out of the ballpark!).

And the Average Fee Guide tool is intended to help you find where the ballpark is in your local area.

Overpricing may reduce your conversion rates, but, to an extent, is offset by the higher fees and return on each survey. Underpricing, on the other hand, may increase your conversion rate, but at the cost of giving away uneccessarily a chunk of your fee on every survey, which you might not have needed to do to win the business. When following up on a lead, it is much easier to negotiate a fee down from a higher initial quote than up, if needed to win the instruction!

This tool will help you identify if you are significantly over or under pricing with your fees, and help you avoid being the proverbial "busy fool" through underpricing.

To Use the Fee Guide

Fees vary considerably across the country, so when setting your fees it helps to understand the average fees in your locality. The fee data is drawn from quotes delivered from our website, so is a true reflection of fee levels in 'real time'.

Primary selection criteria are Survey Type, Number of Bedrooms, and Region. 

Results will then be displayed for the Property Price Bands. If there have been no searches for a particular price band in the selected date period, the band is omitted from the results.

If you don't receive sufficient results, you can try a longer date range, or broadening the geographical scope.

Regional Search

We have divided the country up into the usual economic regions. Selecting the region will give you a good general overview of regional fees - this will give you the greatest number of 'data points', and probably the best average fee information. 

London Regions - we have defined outer London as the largely suburban postcodes out as far as, and adjacent to the M25. Postcode districts in Outer London outside Central London, but within the M25 area overlap with the East Anglia and South East regions, and will be included in both regional results.

 View Regional Map

Postcode Search

You can optionally choose to search for specific postcodes. This can be useful if wanting to find average fees for quite tight geographical locations, but will return fewer results and less consistent average fee data due to fewer data-points.

To find average fees in a specific postcode district, enter it into the Postcode box, e.g. SP6. this will give you the smallest result set. To broaden the search to cover the parent postcode area, use the % wildcard symbol, e.g. SP% will return all the data for the SP postcode area.

A word of warning in relation to using the wildcard search - there are a small number of city postcodes that start with a single letter. These include Glasgow, Liverpool, London, Manchester, and Sheffield. If searching for fees in these cities using the wildcard, you should also make sure you have selected the relevant region, otherwise you will include fees from all postcode areas beginning with that single letter which will distort your results.