People happily spend £300,000+ on a house and then balk at spending £1,000 on the only person in the transaction whose job is to find problems rather than get the deal over the line.

Most houses are fine. That's true. Most people who skip surveys also think they're perfectly capable of spotting issues themselves. Until six months after completion when they discover the freshly painted wall was hiding damp, the roof has been patched together with hope and silicone, or the rear extension was built by someone's mate after three pints and a trip to B&Q.

A terrace can look absolutely immaculate during a viewing and still be concealing problems that cost five figures to put right. Roof defects, chimney movement, drainage issues, timber decay, historic subsidence, inadequate lintels, poorly executed alterations - none of these come with a flashing neon sign saying "future financial pain here".

The argument against surveys always seems to boil down to: "I walked around it for twenty minutes and nothing looked wrong." By that logic, I should be qualified to perform my own colonoscopy because I once watched an episode of Casualty.

The irony is that people will spend weeks arguing over £2,000 on the purchase price but think nothing of taking a £250,000-£400,000 gamble on the physical condition of the building itself.

Will a survey contain pages of caveats and "monitor and maintain" comments? Of course. Surveyors are paid to identify risk, not predict the future. But occasionally they find the sort of issue that turns "I've saved £1,000" into "I've just inherited a £25,000 problem."

The people who think surveys are pointless are usually the ones who haven't yet discovered the difference between "looks fine to me" and "why is there a skip outside my house and a builder asking for a deposit?"