Home check: what you should know about a home before you bid, free

A property advert tells you why you should buy the house. Home Check tells you what could change your mind, what could change the cost, and what to check before you bid.

Tell us which home, and upload its BER documents and the sale advert. We send you a PDF report on that home, with the source and date beside every fact. It takes about three minutes. Home check is free: no card, no subscription. Up to three checks per email address a month. See a sample report. Buying your first home? See what Budget 2027 changed for Help to Buy in the Budget 2027 calculator.

What the report covers

The asking price against nearby sales and the local price per m²
What upgrading would cost, and the SEAI grants for this home
A yearly energy bill and the carbon tax in it
What you can add without planning permission
Planning nearby, building under way, and protected-structure status
The neighbourhood: schools, broadband, radon, census profile and crime against the national rate
What it would rent for, and the costs of buying

What it is not

Not a valuation
Not a survey
Not legal or financial advice
Not a recommendation to buy, sell or build

If a fact has no source, we leave it out.

Before you start, open the home's sale advert (Daft, MyHome or the agent's site) in another tab. Save it as a PDF and you won't need to type anything from it. Your answers are kept on this device until you send them, so you can come back.

Which home?

Eircode of the home At the end of the address in the advert. Seven letters and numbers, like R95 V2D2. Your email We send the report here. Nothing else.

The home's BER documents

The BER Advisory Report gives the home's true floor area and year built, and the assessor's list of upgrades with their cost and grants. With it, your report costs the work for this home rather than an average one. Getting it takes about two minutes.

I'll get the BER documentsBest report. About two minutes. I can't get themFor example, there is no BER number in the advert.

Find the BER number in the advert. It is near the price, labelled "BER No.", nine digits. You only need it to search the register in the next step.
Open the SEAI BER register (opens in a new tab). Paste the number into "BER Number", tick the box, and press Search.
Download both documents. Below the rating there are two buttons. Press Download BER/DEC Certificate, then press Download Advisory Report. Both go to your Downloads folder.
Upload them here, with the advert if you saved it as a PDF. In your Downloads folder they are named like berCertificate_119709640.pdf and advisoryReport_119709640.pdf. Select all of them at once. With the advert, we read the price, type of home and bedrooms from it, so you don't have to type them.

Drop the PDFs here: the certificate, the advisory report and the advertor click to choose them (select them all at once)

Advisory Report: needed
BER certificate: optional
Sale advert: optional, fills in the price and details

From the sale advert

Upload the advert as a PDF (recommended) Nothing is printed on paper: your browser saves the advert page as a file, which you upload here. We read the description and any photos in it.

How do I save the advert as a PDF?

First, open the whole description: on Daft and most agents' sites the description is cut short until you click "View full description" or "Read more". Click it, then save. The full description is where sellers mention work done and problems.

Windows or Chromebook: on the advert page press Ctrl+P. Next to "Destination" choose Save as PDF, press Save, and save it to Downloads.

Mac: press Cmd+P, open the PDF menu at the bottom left, choose Save as PDF, and save it to Downloads.

Phone or tablet: saving a PDF is fiddly there, so paste the description below instead, and add screenshots of the photos.

Or paste the advert's description We read it for facts the forms miss, such as the heating, the site size, work already done and any price change, and show you which facts came from it. Add the advert's photos (optional, up to 12) Screenshots of the photo gallery, inside and out. We look for things to check: an extension or a converted garage that may need planning, damp or cracks for your surveyor, and whether the home looks lived in (which matters for the vacancy grant).

Then check these, usually on the line under the price, for example "3 Bed · 1 Bath · 98 m² · House".

Asking price in euros Type of home If the advert only says "House", the photos usually show which.

Bedrooms

Bathrooms

Used to cost kitchen and bathroom work.

Floor area in m² (optional) The inside of the home, not the site. Adverts sometimes show the site size here.

Site size (optional) Sale status (optional) How long has it been on the market? (optional) The advert usually shows when it was first listed.