The Survey
Once you have found your new home and have made an offer which has been accepted, it may well be advisable to have a surveyor or structural engineer carry out
a survey on the property before proceeding to the next stage.
Often buyers in Italy will be paying cash for the purchase and so are not obliged by a mortgage lender to carry out a survey, so they simply fail to have one carried out.
In fact, it is important to have a survey carried out on foreign properties because most buyers tend to purchase older properties which require a lot of restoration work.
So as well as looking for structural problems a surveyor/geometra or structural engineer can also prepare a quotation/preventivo for the cost of work that needs to be carried out and indeed for the complete restoration of the property.
Even if the property is newly built or recently renovated a surveyor/geometra can check whether all the necessary legal paperwork with regard to building registration is in order.
