What lenders actually look for in a verification report

Reports come back for rework more often than they are found to be wrong. The engineering holds up; the document does not do the job the reader needed it to do. That is a format problem, and format problems are avoidable if you know who is reading.

The reader is not an engineer

A verification report is commissioned by a lender, but the person who has to act on it usually sits in credit risk. They are competent, and they are not structural engineers. If the conclusion only becomes clear after reading nine pages of method, the report will be sent back with a request to clarify — not because it is unclear to an engineer, but because it is unclear to its actual audience.

What makes one straightforward to act on

• A conclusion that appears before the evidence, stated in plain language, with the qualifications attached to it rather than buried later.
• Scope stated as much by exclusion as inclusion. What was not inspected, and why, is frequently the first question asked and the most common reason for a follow-up.
• Findings ranked by consequence rather than by the order they were encountered on site. A defect list in survey sequence makes the reader do the prioritising.
• Every instrument's calibration status included rather than referenced. A certificate that has to be requested separately is a delay built into the document.
• A named, signing engineer who can be reached. Anonymous reports raise a question that costs more time to resolve than it would have to answer up front.

Reports are rarely rejected for being wrong. They are returned for being hard to act on.

Independence is part of the format

A verification report exists because someone wants a view that is not the contractor's and not the developer's. That independence has to be visible in the document, not merely true of it — which means the report should read the same whichever party commissioned it, and should be as willing to record what was satisfactory as what was not.