Housing stock surveys

About the surveys, access to buildings.

We have commissioned a survey of council-owned homes to provide us with detailed information on the condition of the homes we manage. This will help us to plan future repairs and improvements.

The survey is being carried out by Pennington Choices, a property surveying company.

The survey was started in May 2021 and is expected to take around 2 years to complete.

Access

We will write to residents to let them know when their home is due to be included in the survey programme. Tenants will also be contacted by Pennington Choices to make an appointment to carry out a survey inside their home at a convenient time.

Surveys should take around 30 minutes to complete.

Surveyors should not need to come inside leaseholder homes unless it is the only way the rear of the building can be accessed. If this is the case the surveyors will ask permission to do this.

All staff will be wearing ID badges.

About the surveys

The survey will be a visual inspection only and will cover all internal and external parts of homes as well as the communal parts of blocks of flats. It will also look at the energy efficiency of homes and identify any health and safety concerns. If any urgent safety-related issues are identified during the survey, these will be passed on to our repairs service.

As part of the survey, we are also planning to collect information on some homes using building information modelling (BIM). This involves using a laser camera to scan rooms and other areas of a building to enable the creation of a virtual 3D model of it, to which all of the information associated with that building can be linked.