Local, RICS-compliant Reinstatement Cost Assessments for landlords, investors and portfolio owners across Winchester and Hampshire.
If you own or manage property in Winchester, the accuracy of your buildings insurance rests on one number, the reinstatement cost, and in a city of older and listed buildings it is a number that is easy to get badly wrong. Bressummer A.R.K. are RICS chartered building surveyors based on the edge of the city at Hursley, providing professional Reinstatement Cost Assessments (RCAs) to landlords, investors, asset managers, local authorities and block management companies across Winchester and the wider area. As a local practice, we know Winchester’s building stock and can keep your portfolio accurately insured year after year.
A Reinstatement Cost Assessment is the professionally assessed cost of completely rebuilding a property, including demolition, site clearance, professional fees and compliance with current building regulations. It bears no necessary relation to market value or purchase price. The risk of getting it wrong is real and asymmetric: underinsure and your insurer can invoke the principle of average to cut a claim settlement in line with the shortfall; overinsure and you simply overpay on premiums indefinitely.
Winchester makes accurate assessment particularly important because so much of its commercial and residential property is older, period or listed. Rebuilding a listed building, or one in a conservation area, can cost far more than a modern equivalent, because it may require traditional materials, specialist craftsmanship and like-for-like reinstatement to satisfy planning and heritage requirements. Add to that the city’s mix of High Street retail, period office buildings, the Winnall industrial estate, and substantial residential blocks and conversions, and it becomes clear why a generic or indexed figure so often understates the true rebuild cost of a Winchester building. This is precisely where an experienced local chartered surveyor earns their fee.
We aim to be transparent with our cost of services and have produced a table showing the range of our fees below, depending on the size of the property.
If you have a number of properties then give us a call or contact us to get a bespoke quote for portfolio work – Contact Us
| Property Size (sq ft) | Estimated Fees |
| Under 1,000 | < £500 |
| 1,000 – 2,000 | £500 – £750 |
| 2,000 – 5,000 | £750 – £1,000 |
| 5,000 – 10,000 | £1,000 – £1,500 |
| 10,000 – 50,000 | £1,500 – £3,500 |
| 50,000 | £3,500 + |
All our fees are fully inclusive of travel, office and disbursement costs in order to carry out our services, with no ‘hidden extras’.
Check out our reinstatement cost assessment page for more information on how we can help – Reinstatement Cost Assessments
A comprehensive building reinstatement survey and report were completed in a timely, friendly and efficient manner - just as we had been expecting and promised. First class service.
A. Graham
It’s important, in order for us to understand your requirements from the outset in order to give the best commercial building consultancy advice we can.
EnquireWe prepare every Reinstatement Cost Assessment in line with the relevant RICS professional standard for reinstatement cost assessments of buildings. For owners and managing agents, that compliance is the guarantee that the figure has been produced to a recognised, defensible methodology that insurers, brokers, auditors and leaseholders will accept. On Winchester’s period and listed buildings in particular, a properly reasoned RICS-compliant RCA, allowing correctly for heritage reinstatement, is far more than a formality; it is the difference between adequate cover and a damaging shortfall. Our drone-assisted inspections, included at no extra cost, are especially useful on the tall, complex roofs typical of the city’s older buildings.
Our service is designed for owners and managers of multiple properties who need their figures to stay accurate without the cost of a full survey every year. We start with an initial full Reinstatement Cost Assessment of each property, based on a physical inspection and detailed cost analysis. Over the following two years we carry out annual desktop reviews, updating each figure for construction-cost inflation and index movements so your sums insured stay current. Every third year we carry out a full reassessment, returning to each property to capture alterations and to reset the valuation from a fresh baseline. This cycle, an initial assessment, annual desktop reviews and a three-yearly full review, is the most efficient way for a Winchester portfolio owner to remain correctly insured, spreading cost over time while maintaining a clear, auditable record of professional valuations.
Our process to ensure accurate updates to your reinstatement cost assessment over the course of your ownership. All too often RCAs are updated by applying generic inflation rates and this can leave assets woefully underinsured. Our service provides a full review every third year along with annual desktop 'sense checks' in between. This is in line with the RICS's Professional Standards and general guidance.
We will carry out a full blown reinstatement cost assessment as the starting point of our appointment which will include a full survey and inspection of the property, or properties.
A full report will be provided detailing out the full rebuild assessment and valuation along with the full methodology and workings to support the figured arrived at. You can then rely on this figure for obtaining the correct level of building insurance for your asset.
We will contact you a few weeks ahead of time to remind you that an annual review is due. This will be a quicker desktop assessment to review the figures and rates initially used against market indices and to discuss whether there have been any fundamental changes to the property over the year (i.e: extension or upgraded building services) that would materially effect the assessment. An updated report is then issued based off this desktop assessment and discussion.
On the three year anniversary of the original assessment we will reinspect the premises and carry out another full assessment to ensure the reinstatement cost is kept up to date.
Our RCA service suits anyone responsible for several properties, or for buildings where the rebuild cost is genuinely difficult to judge, as Winchester’s older stock so often is. We act for property investors and landlords with commercial and residential portfolios; commercial asset management companies insuring managed buildings on owners’ behalf; residential block management companies and freeholders, where the RCA underpins the buildings insurance every leaseholder relies on; and local authorities and public-sector bodies with varied holdings. Locally, we were appointed by a Hampshire borough council to deliver planned maintenance reporting across its building stock, and we bring that same coordinated, portfolio-wide discipline to reinstatement valuations.
As a Winchester practice, we offer something the national firms cannot: genuine local knowledge of the city’s buildings combined with full RICS-compliant rigour, delivered personally by a chartered surveyor. We are responsive, clear and easy to deal with, and we make portfolio programmes simple by coordinating inspections, reviews and reporting across all your properties. With over 500,000 square feet advised on and more than one million pounds saved for clients across our consultancy, we aim to be the best-in-class adviser on your doorstep, keeping your entire portfolio correctly and defensibly insured.
A professional RCA is much more than one number, and in Winchester the detail particularly matters. For each property we assess the full rebuilding cost, including demolition and site clearance, debris removal, and reconstruction to current building regulations, while also allowing, on period and listed buildings, for traditional materials, specialist craftsmanship and any heritage requirements that a like-for-like reinstatement would demand. We include professional and design fees, allow for access constraints in the historic city centre, and account for features such as basements, plant and distinctive period elements. The result is a transparent, well-documented assessment that explains how the figure has been reached, giving you, your broker and your insurer confidence in the sum insured, and giving leaseholders confidence that their building is properly covered.
The consequences of an inaccurate figure are easy to illustrate. Picture a Winchester period building insured for six hundred thousand pounds when the true cost of heritage-compliant reinstatement is nine hundred thousand. A fire causes one hundred and fifty thousand pounds of damage. Because the building is insured for only two-thirds of its real reinstatement cost, the insurer applies average and pays just two-thirds, around one hundred thousand pounds, leaving the owner to find fifty thousand. On listed and period buildings, where reinstatement costs are routinely higher than owners expect, this kind of shortfall is especially common, and especially painful. A properly reasoned RCA removes the risk.
For an investor or managing agent, the real benefit of our approach is that it makes reinstatement cost a managed process rather than a recurring headache. Having completed the initial assessments across your Winchester properties, we retain the baseline data for each building, so every annual desktop review is efficient and each three-yearly reassessment is simple to schedule. You receive updated figures on a predictable timetable, in a consistent format, ready for your broker at renewal. Newly acquired buildings are absorbed into the same cycle. The result is one coordinated reinstatement programme across your whole portfolio, overseen by a single accountable chartered surveyor who knows your buildings, which is particularly valuable where heritage and period properties demand consistent, informed judgement year to year.
A comprehensive building reinstatement survey and report were completed in a timely, friendly and efficient manner - just as we had been expecting and promised. First class service.
A. Graham
Yes. Listed and period buildings can be considerably more expensive to reinstate because of traditional materials and craftsmanship and heritage requirements, and a standard or indexed figure frequently understates this. We assess them on their specific characteristics.
We recommend a full assessment at the outset, annual desktop reviews in between, and a full reassessment every three years, which is exactly how our standard programme works.
Yes. Our office is at Hursley on the edge of the city, so Winchester and the surrounding area are our home patch and we can attend quickly.
