Two purchases, two hidden stories — and what an independent survey changed about each. Details altered to protect our clients; findings exactly as documented.
Case one · The apartment was perfect. The building was not.
A beautifully kept Altbau flat, mid-renovation building, motivated seller. The apartment itself: genuinely fine. But an inspection that stops at the apartment door is half an inspection. In the stairwell two floors up: mould and a saturated wall. And in the minutes of the owners’ assembly: a rejected insurance claim for a long-running water issue — with collective repairs coming that the seller had not mentioned.
Our client bought — at a price renegotiated to reflect repairs in the tens of thousands that the paperwork, not the walls, revealed.
Case two · The brand-new bathroom
The listing was proud of it: a fully renovated bathroom — new shower, new tray, new tiles. The history was disclosed and sounded reassuring: a burst riser, an insurance claim, a professional repair. Closed file. On paper, the best room in the flat.
The thermal camera liked the new pipework. It did not like the base of the shower tray, which ran cooler than everything around it. On its own, that is a question, not a finding. So we walked around the wall — into the neighbouring room.
There it was: paint lifting off the wall in a band above the skirting — the exact wall shared with the new bathroom. The moisture meter confirmed what the peeling suggested: the wall was still wet inside.
The reconstruction is straightforward. When the riser burst, the wall soaked through. The insurance repair rebuilt the bathroom side beautifully — but the wall was sealed and tiled before it had fully dried. Waterproofed on one face, the trapped moisture did the only thing it could: it migrated to the other side, into the room nobody was renovating, and started pushing the paint off.
Our client went into the negotiation knowing the wall needed opening, drying and refinishing — with a cost estimate in hand, before signing. That is the entire point of measuring both sides of every repaired wall: insurance files close; physics does not.