Snagging
Snagging is the process of listing the defects in a newly built property so the developer fixes them before or shortly after you take the keys. A snag is anything missing, damaged or not built to specification.
Also called: snag list, snagging survey
The term comes from UK housebuilding and has spread to most markets where foreign buyers purchase off-plan. A snagging visit is typically carried out once, in the days before handover, and produces a list: cracked tile in the second bathroom, door that does not close, radiator missing from the hallway. The list goes to the developer, who works through it.
What snagging measures is workmanship. Someone walks the finished property and compares what is in front of them against what a competently built property should look like, and against the specification annexed to your contract. It is genuinely useful and it is the right thing to commission before you sign an acceptance document.
What snagging does not do is tell you anything while the building is going up. By the time a snagging list exists, the structure is finished, the services are buried in the walls, and you have paid most or all of the price. Every item on the list is now a request rather than a condition, because the leverage that came from having money still to pay is gone.
This matters most for anything that is covered up as construction proceeds. Waterproofing under a terrace, reinforcement in a slab, the route of a drainage run: none of it is visible at snagging, and none of it appears on a snag list. It is not that the snagging specialist missed it. It is that by then there is nothing to look at.
Commission snagging before you accept the property. But if the building is still going up, snagging is not the thing that protects you during construction. It is the thing that checks the finish at the end.