Advice please, I am currently looking at buying a property near Luz. The house was built in 1999 and appears to be in very good condition. I have been told that surveys are not the norm in PT, but can be done if I wish. I have been quoted £450 by one surveyor. Any thoughts gratefully received.

Hi Chris We bought a villa 5 yrs ago and because of our history ex -pat Brit living in the UK and NL We felt we needed the security of a survey. It cost us roughly 200 euro's (according to OH) and quite frankly we could have done it ourselves. The guy looked for the obvious i.e. cracks he could put his hand in (none) subsidence(none) mould and leakages (none) ended up telling us that the irrigation pipes in the garden needed burying..and that was it. This is earthquake country so you are quite likely to have cracks here and there.( only small ones though) If it gives you peace of mind though -go for it

1999 is in the transition period; many houses from that time are uninsulated.
You can't tell from the outside, or inside.
After that they put a 5cm polystyrene layer in the exterior walls. It might not sound like much, but it makes a huge difference towards keeping the house dry in winter.

That's just one thing.

I do everything myself, but if I were you I'd go for the survey.

We bought a house that was built about 10 years ago. We previously lived in an apartment that had been renovated but was an older building. We had huge problems with damp in the apartment, but nothing in the house. I think this is entirely down do insulation as liveaboard indicates.

That said, we went to some more recent houses while searching, and saw damp problems in many of them. Flaky and bulging paint around the skirting boards and in some cases whole walls in really bad shape inside. Need to be a bit careful even if you don't see this, if the place has been repainted as the apartment we were in was fine when we moved in, but within a month or two we had damp and mould everywhere.

We also wanted to get a survey, but they don't seem big on those and I think we ended up getting a builder to come look around for a couple of hours. He mainly came up with the fact a few of the latches on the shutters had been chewed by the dog, minor stuff. We got a lawyer to do proper legal searches and handle the transaction, but it seems structural surveys of houses are not really there thing here. But I'd definitely recommend focusing on damp, because that seems to be a real problem in many of the houses we looked at and you really don't want to have to run dehumifiers constantly in the house.