Snagging

Snagging is the process of inspecting a newly built property and listing its defects — anything missing, damaged or not built to the agreed specification — so the developer can put them right before or shortly after the buyer takes the keys. Typically carried out once, near handover, it produces a snag list the developer then works through.

Also called: snag list, snagging survey

Snagging originates in UK housebuilding and has spread to most markets where foreign buyers purchase off-plan. A snagging visit is typically carried out once, in the days before handover, and produces a list: cracked tile in the second bathroom, door that does not close, radiator missing from the hallway. The list goes to the developer, who works through it.

What snagging measures is workmanship. Someone walks the finished property and compares what is in front of them against what a competently built property should look like, and against the specification annexed to your contract. It is genuinely useful and it is the right thing to commission before you sign an acceptance document.

What snagging does not do is tell you anything while the building is going up. By the time a snagging list exists, the structure is finished, the services are buried in the walls, and you have paid most or all of the price. Every item on the list is now a request rather than a condition, because the leverage that came from having money still to pay is gone.

This matters most for anything that is covered up as construction proceeds. Waterproofing under a terrace, reinforcement in a slab, the route of a drainage run: none of it is visible at snagging, and none of it appears on a snag list. It is not that the snagging specialist missed it. It is that by then there is nothing to look at.

Commission snagging before you accept the property. But if the building is still going up, snagging is not the thing that protects you during construction. It is the thing that checks the finish at the end.

We do not sell snagging. It is done by a local firm you engage; what we sell is the visit during construction and the report that comes out of it — see pricing.

Snagging is a workmanship check of a finished property, producing a list of items a developer fixes before or after handover — it confirms how well the building was finished, not what happened structurally while it was under construction.

See also

• Off-plan
• Handover inspection
• Defect liability period