The Property Questionnaire | Scotland Property Auction

The Property Questionnaire is the one part of your Scottish Home Report that you fill in, not the surveyor. It runs to 16 set sections, from your council tax band to whether you have had a notice from the council in the last three years, and the accuracy of every answer is legally yours. Get one wrong and you do not just risk an awkward conversation — you hand a buyer's solicitor a reason to renegotiate, or walk, weeks after you thought the sale was done.

• 16sections to complete
• 3parts to a Home Report
• 9 daysto supply on request
• 28 daystypical auction completion

What is the Property Questionnaire in a Scottish Home Report?

Since December 2008, anyone marketing a home in Scotland has had to provide a Home Report. It has three parts, and they come from three different places:

• The Single Survey and Valuation — written by a chartered surveyor after a visual inspection, with the condition ratings and the valuation figure.
• The Energy Report — the EPC, produced by an accredited assessor.
• The Property Questionnaire — written by you.

That third part is the one sellers skim and buyers' solicitors dissect. The surveyor can only report what they can see on the day. The Questionnaire is where the things a surveyor cannot see get written down: the rot treatment the previous owner had done, the shared-garden maintenance obligation, the letter from the council that arrived last spring.

The Scottish Government's own guidance is blunt about who is responsible. It is completed by the seller or current occupier, and if a buyer asks for the Home Report, you or your agent must provide it within nine days. Fail to, and the buyer can report you to the local council's trading standards service.

What are the 16 sections of the Property Questionnaire?

The format is standardised across Scotland, so every Questionnaire you have ever seen has the same running order. Here is what each section is actually asking, and where sellers most often trip.

Read that list again and notice how much of it is about money someone else can make you spend. Sections 11, 12, 13 and 16 are, between them, a map of every bill a buyer could inherit. That is why solicitors read them first.

Do I have to declare a dispute with my neighbours?

This is the question I get asked most, usually in a slightly guilty tone, and the honest answer is: it depends what you mean by “dispute”.

There is no box on the Scottish Property Questionnaire headed “disputes with neighbours” in the way there is on the English TA6 form. But that does not mean a dispute stays hidden. Look at where one would surface:

• Section 16 — if the row produced a notice, or if your neighbour lodged a planning application you were formally told about, it goes here.
• Section 11 — if the argument is about who maintains the shared drive, the back green or the boundary fence, the joint-responsibility questions are where it lives.
• Section 15 — if a boundary has been moved in the last decade, say so, whatever the atmosphere at the time.
• Section 11 again — access rights in both directions. If your neighbour claims a right to walk over your ground and you dispute it, that is a live issue a buyer needs to know about.

Beyond the form, there is a broader point. Scottish conveyancing runs on missives, and missives routinely include warranties about the property. Your solicitor will ask you directly about disputes, statutory notices and unresolved obligations. A neighbour problem you kept out of the Questionnaire tends to reappear in the missives stage anyway — only now it looks like something you were hiding.

What counts as a “notice that affects your property”?

Section 16 is the section most likely to be answered “No” by reflex, and it is the one where a wrong “No” does the most damage. It asks whether, in the last 3 years, you have received a notice:

1. advising that the owner of a neighbouring property has made a planning application;
2. that requires you to do maintenance, repairs or improvements to your property;
3. that affects your property in some other way.

That second one is where statutory notices sit — the local authority instructions that oblige owners in a tenement or terrace to contribute to common repairs. They can be substantial and they follow the property. We have written separately on selling with statutory notices outstanding and on factor arrears, because both regularly decide whether a Scottish flat sells on the open market or needs a different route.

The third limb — “affects your property in some other way” — is deliberately wide. Road adoption schemes, compulsory purchase consultations, tree preservation orders, licensing notices for a short-term let next door: all of it belongs here.

What happens if I get an answer wrong?

There is a meaningful difference between an innocent error and a misrepresentation, and the consequences scale accordingly.

Note the pattern in the right-hand column. Almost none of these surface early. They surface at the point where you have already given notice on your tenancy, paid for a removal firm, or committed to a purchase of your own. That is the real cost of a careless Questionnaire — not a penalty, but a collapsed timeline.

If you have already had a sale fall through this way, the route back is usually to fix the disclosure and change the sales method rather than to relist and hope. Our guide to what Sold STC really means in Scotland explains why an accepted offer is far less final than sellers assume.

Which answers most often stall a Scottish sale?

Across the flats, terraces and rural properties we see, the same handful of sections cause most of the delay.

• Section 6, alterations. A kitchen extension, a loft conversion, a removed chimney breast or a knocked-through wall — if it was structural, the buyer's solicitor will want the building warrant and completion certificate. No paperwork means an indemnity policy at best, a stalled sale at worst. See our guide to selling with no building warrant.
• Section 13, specialist works. Scottish tenements and older stone-built houses very often have historic rot or damp treatment. Sellers say “no” because it happened before they bought. The question says “as far as you are aware” — and if you were told at purchase, you are aware.
• Section 11, shared responsibilities. Tenement law in Scotland imposes common repair obligations by default. Answering “no” to the roof and stair question in a four-in-a-block is almost always wrong.
• Section 10, services. Septic tanks, private water supplies and non-mains drainage all change what a lender will accept. Our piece on off-grid and unserviced homes covers this ground in detail.
• Section 14, guarantees. Having the guarantee is worth money. Knowing a guarantee exists but having lost the paperwork — which is extremely common — needs saying plainly, as in the real Questionnaires where sellers note a 30-year rot guarantee they no longer hold documents for.

Does the Property Questionnaire still matter if I sell at auction?

Yes, on both counts: you still need one, and it matters more, not less.

A Home Report is required whenever a property is put on the market in Scotland, and an auction listing is marketing. The narrow exemptions — homes on the market continuously since before 1 December 2008, new-build sold off-plan or to the first occupier, newly converted homes not yet used in converted form, genuine dual-use residential and commercial premises, and seasonal holiday homes that cannot legally be occupied year-round — almost never apply to the sort of property that comes to auction. We cover the detail in Home Reports and auction sales.

The auction dynamic is genuinely different from the open market. On the open market, a buyer discovers a problem at survey stage and uses it as leverage on price. At a traditional Scottish auction, the buyer has already read everything before they raise a hand — the legal pack contains the Home Report, the title, the searches and the Articles of Roup. There is no post-hammer renegotiation. That cuts both ways, and it is why we are so insistent with sellers about getting the Questionnaire right first time.

How do auction buyers actually read the Questionnaire?

Differently from a first-time buyer, and it is worth understanding how.

An owner-occupier reads the Questionnaire looking for reasons to feel safe. A developer or investor reads it looking for the cost of the works and who is on the hook for them. They go straight to sections 11, 12, 13, 14 and 16 — shared obligations, factor charges, rot history, guarantees and notices — because those are the numbers that go into their appraisal.

Which means a Questionnaire full of honest “yes” answers is not the disaster sellers imagine. A property with declared rot treatment, a live statutory notice and a known factor charge is a property an auction buyer can price. A property where every box says “no” but the survey tells a different story is one they will not bid on at all.

What if I honestly don't know the answer?

Then say so. Several questions are framed “as far as you are aware” and section 1 exists precisely to establish how long you have had to become aware of anything. An owner of eighteen months is not expected to know what happened to the roof in 1998.

Where you genuinely do not know, the good answers look like this:

• “Unknown — property purchased 2019, no records passed on.” Honest, dated, and tells the buyer where to look.
• “Preventative work carried out by previous owners; I understand a guarantee exists but do not hold the documents.” This is how real Questionnaires read, and it is far safer than a bare “no”.
• “Shared maintenance of rear garden — informal arrangement with neighbours, not documented in title so far as I know.”

What you must not do is leave sections blank. A blank box reads as evasion and invites a solicitor's enquiry that costs you a week. And do not guess. “Band C” from memory when the council says Band D is a small error that quietly undermines every other answer you gave.

If a term on the form is unfamiliar — servitude, burden, factor, right of pre-emption — our Scottish property terms glossary is the fastest way to translate it into plain English before you commit an answer to paper.

Can I still sell if my Property Questionnaire is full of problems?

Yes — but the honest answer is that the route may need to change.

A Questionnaire declaring a live statutory notice, historic rot, a missing building warrant and an unresolved boundary will narrow your open-market audience sharply, because most of those buyers need a mainstream mortgage and most mainstream lenders want none of it. That is not a reason to fudge the form. It is a reason to sell to the audience that can actually buy the property.

If that last row applies to you, read our guide to what a Home Report Category 3 actually means — it is the single most misunderstood rating in Scottish selling, and it is not the sentence sellers assume it is.

Your pre-signing checklist

Before you sign the Questionnaire, spend an hour gathering these. It is the cheapest hour in your whole sale.

1. Your council tax bill — for the band, from the document, not from memory.
2. Your purchase paperwork — the Home Report you received when you bought. It will remind you of rot treatment, alterations and shared obligations you have since forgotten.
3. Building warrants and completion certificates for anything structural done on your watch.
4. Guarantee documents — damp course, roofing, electrical, NHBC, underpinning, cavity wall.
5. Factor statements for the last two years, and any notice of common works.
6. Every letter from the council from the last three years. Check the drawer. Check the email folder too.
7. Your title deeds — specifically the burdens section, for access rights and maintenance obligations you may never have thought about.

Then answer each of the 16 sections from the paperwork rather than from recall. Where the paperwork is missing, say the paperwork is missing.

Where to go from here

A carefully completed Property Questionnaire does two things at once: it protects you legally, and it shortens your sale. Buyers' solicitors raise fewer enquiries, lenders hesitate less, and nobody discovers anything alarming in week six.

If your honest answers point to a property that mainstream buyers will struggle with, that is worth knowing now rather than after three months on the market. We sell Scottish properties with exactly these issues every month, and the binding-on-the-hammer structure of a traditional auction means a disclosed problem stops being a deal-breaker and starts being a number.

Source: mygov.scot - Home Report (Scottish Government)

Written & reviewed by Julie McAndrews

Founder & Director of Scotland Property Auction, with 10+ years helping Scottish homeowners sell fast at auction.

More about Julie →

✔ Reviewed by Julie McAndrews. We keep our guides current with Scottish property law and market conditions.