The infighting is costing surveying the next generation

Three home surveys a week or ten. That is the debate that consistently comes up time and time again in residential surveying. The corporate versus the independent debate.

Recently Jony Milner made a valid point about customer reviews.

A five star review is a moment in time. Someone leaves a glowing review the week they move in, then six months later they find the damp problem the surveyor missed. Does the review still count. He was not attacking anyone. He was asking a genuinely useful question about how we measure the quality of a review.

What happened next tells you everything about the state of residential surveying right now. Within days, that clip had become ammunition. A post appeared picking apart a corporate surveying firm’s marketing claims, review scores included, point by point. Comments piled on. Independent surveyors badmouthing corporates, the same pattern playing out that always plays out.

I talk to surveyors across every discipline, commercial, building surveying, quantity surveying, geospatial and so on. I watch what happens on social media and I track it closely.

I have never seen anything like the infighting inside residential surveying. Not close.

And it is one directional. I see independents criticising corporates constantly. I almost never see it the other way round.

So why does this only seem to happen in residential? I do not see this in quantity surveying. I do not see this in building surveying. Those professionals disagree, debate, even argue, but they do not do it like this. So what is different about residential surveying that makes public point scoring feel normal.

I think there are two things going on. Residential surveying is consumer facing in a way most of the other disciplines are not. Surveyors are competing for the same homeowners, on the same review platforms, for the biggest purchase most of those homeowners will ever make. That alone creates more pressure and more visibility than a QS competing for a commercial contract ever faces. But visibility is not the whole answer, because visibility does not force anyone to behave badly.

There are also a number of online groups that have spent years normalising exactly this kind of public sniping and in fighting, to the point where a chunk of the profession now treats it as simply how residential surveyors talk to each other. I am not naming them. Anyone in residential surveying already knows which ones I mean. But it is a real part of the answer, and pretending otherwise does not help.

Since the Jony Milner episode went out, I have had messages from trainees. Not complaints about the podcast, the opposite. They enjoyed it. But told me, unprompted, that watching this kind of behaviour online has made them question whether they want a future in this profession at all. I’ve also had a number of emails from surveyors, mirroring a similar sentiment.

This is where it gets genuinely maddening. Every conference I go to, every panel, every industry discussion, the same question comes up. Why does nobody know what a surveyor actually does. Why can we not get more people into this profession. We spend so much energy on awareness campaigns, careers content, talking about the value of the work. Then in the same week, one corner of the same profession behaves in a way that undoes every bit of that effort.

I have had person after person tell me, over years, that watching this kind of public sniping is the reason they are not sure they want to be a surveyor. Not the exams. Not the entry requirements. Not the pay. What they see online. Nobody watching commercial building surveying or quantity surveying is being put off a career by what they see there. This is specific to residential, and it is entirely self inflicted.

I want to be clear about where I stand. I represent the SME surveying community more than I represent the corporates. That is not going to change. But this is not about picking a side in an independents versus corporates fight. It is about recognising that the constant public point scoring, wherever it comes from, damages every one. It damages how the public sees surveyors. It damages how the next generation sees this career. And it does nothing, absolutely nothing, to make anyone’s work better.

I am not a surveyor, but I trained as a chartered accountant, and I have lived both sides of this argument myself. I qualified at a small independent firm, then went on to work at PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the biggest corporates in the profession. Both had real strengths. The independent firm gave me close mentoring and a genuine feel for client relationships from day one. PwC gave me structure, scale, and exposure to work I would never have seen in a small practice. Neither one was the right answer. They were simply different, and I am a better professional for having done both.

I see the same thing in residential surveying itself. I know excellent surveyors on both sides, independent and corporate. I know people who started at a corporate and moved to independent practice, and people who went the other way, independent to corporate, and built a career they are proud of either way. It is not one size fits all. Whether you think a homeowner gets a better service from a corporate or an independent is not really the point. What matters is that you do good work, whichever model you choose. The finger pointing, the blaming, the scoring of points off each other, does not read as principled to anyone watching from outside the profession. It reads as bitter. And bitterness does nothing except damage how residential surveying looks as a career choice.

Next week’s podcast guest is Richard Balham, an independent residential surveyor. He is going to talk openly about the genuine value of starting out at a corporate, the structure, the training, the support that independents often cannot offer a newly qualified surveyor. An independent making a fair, generous point about corporates. That should not be remarkable. The fact that it is tells you how far the discourse has drifted.

I can see value on both sides, because I have lived it in my own career. Most surveyors I speak to can too, once you get them away from LinkedIn and into an actual conversation. The profession has a conduct problem, and it is doing more damage to attracting people into this career than anything else I have come across.

Get out of the playground. This is not robust professional debate, whatever it dresses itself up as. It is one-upmanship. It is petty, it is futile, and it achieves precisely nothing except proving who can land the sharpest comment. Nobody wins a client by winning an argument on LinkedIn. Every hour spent scoring points off another surveyor is an hour not spent showing the public what genuinely excellent work looks like. If we are serious about elevating surveying, this is the first thing that needs to change, not another awareness campaign, but a straight look at what is actively driving people away.

If you are tired of watching your profession tear strips off itself in public, you are not alone, and you are not wrong to feel that way.

Nina