Schedule of condition template: what every row must record

A schedule of condition is a factual record of how a building looks on a given day. It is not advice, it is evidence. Its job is to be pulled out of a drawer in four years when a landlord says the tenant cracked the slab, or a neighbour says your client's piling cracked their gable, and to settle the argument with photographs and dated wording.

That changes how you write it. A survey persuades; a schedule of condition describes. If you keep that distinction in your head while you fill in the rows, the document does its job.

What a schedule of condition is for

Three jobs come up again and again.

Lease schedules: attached to a lease so the tenant's repairing obligation is limited to the condition recorded. The wording has to be tight enough that a dilapidations surveyor years later cannot argue a crack was hairline when your photograph shows it 3mm wide.

Party wall and adjoining owner schedules: taken before works start under the Party Wall etc. Act 1996, so damage claims can be tested against a dated record of the neighbour's rooms.

Pre-works and handover records: before a strip-out, a scaffold, a roof replacement or a contractor taking possession of a site. Managing agents also use them at tenancy change on commercial units.

In all three the test is the same: could someone who was never there understand exactly what you saw?

How it differs from a building survey

People ask for "a survey" when they mean a schedule, and the fee quoted goes wrong from there. The difference is simple.

	Schedule of condition	Building survey
Purpose	Record condition on a date	Advise a client on a building
Tone	Factual, descriptive	Diagnostic, with opinion
Causes	Not usually given	Investigated and explained
Recommendations	Rarely, and flagged as separate	Central to the report
Photos	Every element, heavily referenced	Selective, illustrative

A schedule says "rear elevation render, vertical crack 2 to 3mm from cill of window W2 to DPC level, previously filled and painted over". A survey says "this crack is consistent with historic settlement; monitoring recommended". Mixing the two weakens both. If you have been asked for an opinion as well, give it in a separate covering letter so the schedule stays clean. Our note on what goes in a building inspection report covers the diagnostic side.

What each row needs

The row is the unit of a schedule of condition. Get the row right and the template writes itself. Each one needs five things.

Element reference. Not "wall" but "Ground floor, Room G04 (rear office), north wall". Number rooms and elevations on a sketch plan at the front and use those references everywhere. For external work, use compass elevations, never "front" and "back", because the next surveyor may approach from a different side.

Description of condition. Factual, measured, no adjectives doing heavy lifting. Give dimensions where you can: crack widths in millimetres, areas of staining in metres, number of missing slates. "Fair condition" on its own is worthless in a dispute. "Plaster sound, two filled cracks above door head, decoration serviceable, light scuffing at skirting" is useful.

Grading. A simple category so the reader can scan. Most of us use three: Cat 1 acceptable, Cat 2 defective but not urgent, Cat 3 requires attention now. Keep the definitions on the first page and use them consistently, because a managing agent reading 60 pages will trust the grades before the prose.

Action. Often "none, record only" in a lease schedule. On a pre-works or handover schedule it might be "make good prior to possession". Say whose action it is.

Indicative cost. Only where you have been asked for it. Label it indicative, state the date and that it excludes VAT, access and survey of concealed elements. A total at the end helps the agent budget, but make clear it is not a tender sum.

Add a photo reference column and a notes column for anything odd: locked rooms, no access, tenant's stock blocking an elevation. Record non-access explicitly, because silence later reads as "it was fine".

Photographs: the part that decides disputes

Text is argued over, photographs rarely are. For a schedule of condition, photograph more than feels necessary.

For each room: a wide shot from each corner, then close-ups of every defect you have written about. For each elevation: a full shot plus close-ups. Include something for scale next to cracks, a rule or a tape, with the measurement visible. Keep the camera's date stamp on, or rely on the file metadata and say in the preamble that originals are retained.

Number the photos to match the row references, so P-G04-03 is the third photo in room G04. A schedule where the reader has to hunt for the picture gets used half as well.

Floors and ceilings get forgotten. Photograph carpets, tile damage, ceiling stains and the condition of services on display: trunking, pipe runs, rads, fuseboard covers. Those are the items claimed against most often.

Wording that holds up

Keep a standard preamble you reuse. It should say the date and weather, who attended, the limitations (visual, no opening up, no testing of services, no access above head height without ladders), and that the schedule records condition only and is not a structural or survey opinion.

Avoid "good", "poor", "satisfactory" without qualification. Use "as new", "serviceable", "worn but functioning", "damaged", "missing" and define them. Avoid the passive voice when it hides a fact: "the ceiling has been repaired" is weaker than "patch repair approximately 400 x 400mm to ceiling adjacent to light fitting, decoration not matched".

If you did not see something, say so in the row: "concealed behind tenant's racking, not inspected". That single sentence has saved more surveyors than any amount of careful prose elsewhere.

Making the template work on site

Most of us start with a spreadsheet, and most of us end up re-typing it in the office. The time goes in matching photographs to rows and getting the thing laid out so it reads well.

It is worth building the template around your actual sequence on site: outside first, roof from ground and from access, then floor by floor, room by room, then services and externals. Record in the order you walk, so you never leave a room half done.

This is the part of the job we built building inspection reports around: notes and photos captured in the room, mark-up on the photo itself, grading applied as you go, and a branded PDF the client can sign on their phone. The schedule layout keeps one row per element with its photos alongside.

Issuing and signing

A schedule of condition only works if both parties have the same version. Issue it as a PDF, keep the original photographs, and get an acknowledgement. For lease schedules it is normally annexed to the lease and initialled by both solicitors; for party wall schedules, the adjoining owner signing to confirm they agree the record is what makes it stick.

Keep every version. If you revisit after an access issue, issue a dated revision rather than overwriting, and say in the covering email what changed.

Pick one of your recent jobs and rebuild it as a five-column schedule with numbered photographs, and you will see within a page where your usual wording is too vague. If you want to test the format on a live job, you can start a free trial and produce five reports without a card.