IT'S NOW official. With effect from today , the Home Report is going to be a feature of every residential property sale in Scotland. There has been much negativity about the report, fuelled by fears that lenders will not accept the generic mortgage valuation or the Single Survey.

Amongst all the negativity, the positives of the report tend to struggle to get a hearing. It will probably require a year or two for the dust to settle on the debate, but there is a reasonable probability that the Home Report will become as normal a part of the sale process as engaging an estate agent. Many in the sector feel the benefits far outweigh the negativity that the element of compulsion introduces.

As Eric Curran, a partner at chartered surveyors DM Hall and a member of the Committee on Home Reports for the last seven years, notes, whether you love them or hate them, the reports have arrived and from this moment on people need to try and get the most out of them.

"As surveyors, it is not a question of whether we like or dislike Home Reports. They are here and we need to focus on getting a product that works," he says.

Lorna Brown, senior solicitor at Maxwell Maclaurin, concurs: "We have to treat them as a good thing. So much time and money has been invested in the Home Report, particularly by the Scottish Government, that it is obviously here to stay, come what may."

Curran is pretty confident that Home Reports will not just work, but will bring real benefits to the beleaguered Scottish housing market. This, despite surveyors taking the blame in some sections of the media for the fact that some lenders say they will not accept the generic survey. Curran says that, so far, only Barclays has said that it does not plan to accept the Single Survey and generic mortgage valuation.

"So much rubbish is being written about Home Reports." he says. "I see figures of £800 being bandied about as the fee for a Home Report, for example. It might be, but the house in question would be at the top end of the market."

A typical figure for a Home Report for an averagely priced property of £160,000 would be about £400 to £450 plus VAT. For that sum, Curran points out, the seller gets far more than the old-style review survey, which told neither buyer nor lender very much. Curran says: "The main reason lenders have expressed reservations about the Single Survey and the generic valuation is that they are not in a form that the lenders are accustomed to, even though they contain all the information the lender would normally get, and a lot more besides."

However, he argues, this argument weakens when the profession says that it is prepared to transcribe the information into the lender's standard form. "We have to remember that it has always been up to the lender to decide how long after the date of the valuation it was prepared to accept it. Our valuations are always a snapshot of a house at a particular moment of time. Yet many lenders have traditionally accepted valuations up to six months after they were given, and three months is very usual.

"So, I struggle to see why a lender would not accept a Single Survey, which is much more detailed and informative than a Type-1 report, and which comes from a firm of solicitors that they have on their approved list anyway."

If lenders balk at accepting Home Reports for valuation purposes, then it will be up to the Scottish Government, which has championed the reports, to knock some sense into them.

However, a problem arises when a lender wants more information from the surveyor than the Single Survey and generic mortgage valuation provide. Remember, the surveyor acts for the seller, not the lender. So if the lender wants more information, then the surveyor has to go back to the seller to ask permission. But, that lender will be acting in regard to one potential purchaser. The property may well have 20 or more interested parties calling for copies of the report. If the surveyor adds more information to it, they then have a duty to inform all other parties.

"Imagine we phone each of the 19 other interested parties, and, say, the third person we phone asks a few more new questions. When we answer these, we then have a duty to phone everyone else in the loop and, if they elicit new information, we'd have to phone round yet again. No surveyor's office could function with this kind of cascading call structure, so it is just not something we can get into," Curran says.

So, again, banks will have to step up and accept Home Report valuations, unless the valuation has aged beyond a reasonable period, or end up butting heads with the Scottish Government.

Assuming that the so-called confrontation with the lenders turns out to be a phony problem, the positives of the Home Report should very quickly outweigh the culture shock they seem to be inducing. For a start, there is no doubt they will be a huge benefit to first-time buyers, who no longer need to pay for a survey and won't be caught in the multiple surveys trap, which happens when they keep losing out in "closing date" bids and have to get a fresh survey done for each new property they want to make an offer on.

Curran argues that sellers get a huge benefit from an influx of first-time buyers into the market, since the absence of a "chain" makes the whole sale process so much quicker. With properties at the bottom and middle of the market moving more quickly, that helps to free up sellers who want to upgrade their homes, so the upper reaches of the market also benefit.

At the same time, sellers are almost always also buyers too, so although they have to bear the costs of the Home Report, they also benefit from no survey as a buyer and no multi-surveys.

Brown also expects first-time buyers to welcome the reports, since they are free to them and give much more information than a simple survey. She says: "The hope is that they will encourage markets to pick up. The sales process will be much quicker if first-time buyers are attracted in numbers into the market and the banks start lending to them again."

Curran says that, because properties carry an up-to-date mortgage valuation, the days of the contentious "offers over" system are numbered.

"Nothing annoys a prospective buyer more than bidding for a £180,000 house only to find that it was sold for £265,000. With Home Reports we could be moving to a 'guideline' price that much more accurately reflects the final selling price," he says. If that happens, it should be enough to make the Home Report very welcome indeed.

Putting your house in order is cornerstone of new system

THE origins of the Home Report go back to the government's Housing Improvement Task Force, set up in 2003 to look at ways of addressing the estimated £5 billion repair and maintenance bill hanging over Scotland's privately-owned housing stock.

The Scottish Government's thinking seems to be that if sellers had to disclose the state and condition of their home prior to sale, they would be more motivated to maintain the property to a high standard. The Housing (Scotland) Act 2006, introduced the basic parameters for the Home Report by requiring specific information to be available when a house is being marketed for sale in Scotland. The regulations were approved by a majority in the Scottish Parliament earlier this year.

The Home Report didn't just spring full-blown from legislation, however. It has been shaped by the Home Report Implementation Group, which included representatives from the Law Society of Scotland, the Council of Mortgage Lenders, the National Association of Estate Agents, the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) and the Scottish Consumer Council.

The obligation to pay for the report is on the seller and the implementing parties in Scotland charged with preparing the report are firms of surveyors accredited by RICS. Since the reports can be distributed to prospective buyers electronically, a number of Home Report "distribution" operations exist.

There is no option here for sellers as far as the report is concerned. Failure to provide a Home Report will have the local authority Trading Standards Officers coming down on the seller. The penalty for non-compliance is £500 – and the seller still has to produce the report.

RICS has confirmed the mortgage valuation element will be covered by the fee for the report, which means that lenders will find the report contains the same information, from the same accredited professionals, as they currently rely on when making lending decisions concerning mortgages.