Why I built this
I moved back to Leicester last year after twelve years in New Zealand. Then we tried to buy a house, and I could not believe how this country does it.
In New Zealand you find a house, make an offer, and you have five to ten days to sort your survey and your finance. Then you put a deposit down and you are legally committed. When we bought there, we first viewed in early December and moved in on the 20th of January.
In the UK the average sale takes around 160 days, and close to one in three fall through. Nobody is committed to anything until exchange, which can be months in. Everyone I spoke to told me how stressful it was, as if that were simply the weather.
What struck me was not that the process is slow. It is that first-time buyers go into it with no idea what is normal, no relationships with anyone, and no way of telling whether their solicitor is slow or the whole thing is just like this. Everyone else in the room has done it hundreds of times.
What I actually do
I’m Ryan Antrobus, a chartered quantity surveyor (MRICS). For the last eight years my job has been working for lenders, looking after their interests on development projects: whether costs are running away, whether the programme is slipping, what the exit looks like if it goes wrong.
Banks get that analysis before they part with money. First-time buyers get a mortgage calculator and good luck.
So the tools here do the same job, on the other side. Work out the real number. Find what has been left out. Say plainly where the risk is.
What I’m not
I’m a quantity surveyor, so cost is my area. What building work actually costs, whether a budget stacks up, what a repair bill really looks like.
I am not a building surveyor and I don’t do home surveys. I can’t tell you whether that crack is subsidence. I can tell you what it costs to fix once someone qualified has told you what it is, and whether the price you are paying reflects that.
Most of my practice has been in New Zealand. The principles of cost and risk travel, but UK specifics like stamp duty, leasehold reform and conveyancing are researched and sourced rather than delivered from memory, and where something is uncertain the tools say so.
How this is funded
Right now, it isn’t. There are no referral partners, no ads, and nothing is sold here.
The plan is to earn referral fees from solicitors and mortgage brokers in time, but only where they genuinely help you, and only with it said plainly on the page. If you ever see a recommendation here without a disclosure next to it, something has gone wrong.
I’d rather tell you that than pretend this is charity.
Get in touch
If something here is wrong, out of date or unclear, I’d like to know. You can get in touch here. If there’s a tool you wish existed, tell me that too.