In the gaze of a dozen pairs of yearning eyes, Zhang Ai took out a tuck ruler, an ultrasonic distance measure and a number of devices you could hardly name and began his work.
About two hours later, he handed in a survey report to his sceptical clients and possibly make them feel enlightened.
People at the scene said Zhang's proficiency and dedication reminded them of the same qualities usually manifested in a physician. And the comparison isn't that far off.
Often compared to a doctor for houses, Zhang is a private surveyor hired by home buyers to inspect for defects and survey houses they are going to purchase.
"Our job is to make customers fully aware of their houses' quality," said Zhang, who works for a private surveying company in Shanghai that was set up just a few months ago. "With a national standard, we are in a neutral position to inspect and survey apartments for our customers."
Overnight, it seems, Chinese home buyers' awareness has been aroused that property developers might be offering substandard apartments with defects that are not immediately apparent, leading to efforts to have their new units inspected.
It costs a few hundred yuan to have a surveyor with skill and good judgement survey the apartment they obtained by saving hundreds of thousands of yuan or even by borrowing huge sums and becoming "house slaves."
What's more, recent news reports said residential buildings in China can be used for an average of 30 years about only half of the term expected before they are dismantled out of facility or safety concerns.
So, private property surveying, as a new kind of profession, is sprouting up quickly across China.
From Shanghai to the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, from Heilongjiang in the north to Yunnan and Hainan, emerging house surveying agencies are hiring professionals with civil engineering knowledge and are reporting a robust business.
And those in the sector are optimistic about the future given that in Shanghai alone, nearly 200,000 new units were sold in 2005, in addition to a large number of second-hand houses bought and sold every year. Even if only 10 percent of homebuyers use the service, the amount of business would be colossal.
From mid-February, when the agency that employs Zhang and several other surveyors opened for business, until the end of May, it has inspected and surveyed more than 160 apartments.
Zhang and his colleagues have the needed professional expertise, having graduated as civil engineering majors with experience working for real estate companies.
The surveyors mainly inspect and survey the doors, windows, kitchen and bathroom, power outlets and switches, gas lines, circuits and other minor places. They don't inspect major things such as the building's structure and construction areas.
One flat that Zhang surveyed measured 180 square meters and was located in Shanghai's Baoshan District.
The first flaws Zhang detected were minor cracks in the wall and hollow joints. He carefully marked them with pencil or chalk. In the following hours, Zhang discovered 17 questionable places, including other cracks, hollow joints and deformed door frames. He wrote them down in his report.
"The problems with the flat are not that serious," concluded Zhang. "Despite 17 flaws, the house is no serious safety jeopardy. Improvements can be made (by the owners) or the owners could ask property agents to do it."
As an appraiser, Zhang said his job is to uncover problems and discrepancies in their clients' property and provide a consultancy for new homebuyers.
Sometimes even the most obvious discrepancies are hard for regular customers to notice until they show one or two years later, Zhang said, mostly because of the serious imbalance of information between property developers and homeowners.
According to current regulations, newly constructed commercial buildings are subject to random inspections by an independent quality inspection station, but minor flaws in residential units might be ignored.
Property developing company representatives say waterproofing problems and cracks in walls are the most common flaws in a new building. But they can be found only after downpours or after the building has been occupied for a few years.
"The information imbalance caused some developers to shirk their responsibility and trouble their homebuyers," said Xing Yuanzhi, deputy director of the property research centre at Shanghai University.
"The emergence of the private property surveyor has filled the gap and has served as an indicator that the Chinese real estate market is becoming rational."
Surveying a highly technical profession requiring knowledge of mathematics, physics and applied sciences as well as the relevant requirements of law has been around for a long time, but house surveying is new in China.
Because disputes between housing developers and buyers are common in China today, the job of private housing surveyor came into being in 2005. Surveyors usually help homebuyers check housing quality before they move in. However, surveyors don't have any official qualifications and are therefore called "private" housing assessors.
With technicians' know-how, homebuyers will find it easier to negotiate with housing developers for better settlements, which is part of reason that surveying is a growing profession, Ding Bo, founder of what is considered the first group of private housing surveyors in China, was quoted as saying by Xinhua News Agency.
Ding, a senior engineer in a real estate company based in Nanjing, capital of east China's Jiangsu Province, started surveying for his relatives and friends two years ago.
After discovering almost every apartment he checked had major or minor problems, Ding launched his own surveying and consultancy business in 2005. Now, he has more than 20 surveyors in his company.
But two years ago, property consumers in Nanjing rarely sought legal advice when encountering quality problems. Ding's first advertisement on a real estate website in late 2004 received no response.
However, homebuyers' awareness of the need to defend their rights rose quickly. In 2005, he surveyed more than 3,500 homes and has a monthly salary of more than 40,000 yuan (US$4,932). A single appraisal for an apartment is about 200 yuan (US$25) and the average monthly salary for a surveyor is reportedly around 20,000 yuan (US$2,467).
"This business was not created from nowhere. It meets the demand of homebuyers who have questions about housing quality," Ding said.
Ding's company's services include listing suggestions for improvement to property developers, offering homebuyers negotiation assistance when dealing with developers and hiring lawyers to provide legal support.
"Our job is not to make trouble for the developers. Like a third party, we are objective and responsible," Ding said. "If we got a flawless apartment, we would be even happier than the developer. But so far, we haven't seen a perfect apartment yet."
However, customers have mixed feelings about the profession.
A homeowner surnamed Wang appreciated the service the private surveyors provided. "I am often busy," she said. "I have no time and no idea (how to survey the house).
"The surveyors present a lot of professional and inspiring ideas and monitor the procedure."
She added that although hiring a property surveyor may cost a little bit, living in a house with problems means being stuck with repair bills in the thousands of yuan in the future.
But not everyone is happy with the job the surveyors do. Another client, who gave only his surname, Jin, was critical, calling the effort "very superficial" despite the large number of items subject to inspection.
"Ordinary homeowners would like to know if the building's foundation is strong, whether it has proper structure and whether potential discrepancies in kitchen and bathroom will lead to serious consequences, but such problems could be monitored only during construction and discrepancies discovered by surveyors are of the type that decoration is the way to fix them."
He said he wouldn't recommend his friends to have their apartments inspected and surveyed by a private surveyor.
"We don't get into those parts such as construction area and major structure of the building, because we are not authorized to do that," Zhang said, adding that a national quality inspection institution would make a report that includes those most important indexes.
Also, Zhang said that they kept a neutral stance between developer and homeowners, and don't support homeowners using them as a bargaining chip to negotiate a discount with the seller or simply ask them to return their money and let them move out.
"We don't get into the disputes between developers and homebuyers," Zhang said. "We refused to be hired by homeowners who want to use our report to be against developers."
But concerns then are aroused when some real estate developers realized they could use the service of private surveyors to promote their property and invited a private agency to inspect their property.
But most private agencies are eager to draw a line with property companies.
"No apartment is flawless," Zhang said, and the next step most surveying agencies will take is to seek a balance between home owners and developers.
(China Daily July 19, 2006)
