Why does surveying matter?

The podcast
I am now twenty-seven episodes into This Is Surveying and I look forward to recording it every single week. The audience is growing well! Feedback has been brilliant. Engagement across LinkedIn, YouTube and Buzzsprout has been consistent and, more importantly, thoughtful. People listening at the gym, on holiday, walking the dog.

The variety of guests is what keeps it interesting. Party wall, dilapidations, residential, valuation, marine, drone, geospatial, rail freight, damp and timber, retrofit, EPC reform, construction consultancy, party wall, recruitment. Apprentices, senior partners, sole practitioners, firm owners. Public sector and private sector.

That variety is not accidental. It is the whole point of the podcast. Surveying is not one profession; it is dozens. And when you actually let surveyors from every corner of it speak for themselves, the profession is far bigger, more interesting and more human than the media ever makes it look.

Off the back of that growth, I am now offering podcast sponsorship, and I am delighted to say the first sponsorship has just been secured by Rebuild Cost UK.

If you are interested in sponsoring the podcast, or in appearing as a guest on a Spotlight episode, please get in touch. Spotlight episodes are our Thursday commercial format for firms and businesses who want a longer, deeper conversation about who they are and what they do, sitting alongside the main editorial series.

Looking for guests

I plan the podcast well ahead, and I am always looking for surveyors and related professionals to come on. If you are a surveyor, or you know one who would be interesting to hear from, please let me know.

Drop me a message here on LinkedIn or email me direct – nina@surveyors-uk.com

All podcast episodes HERE

Now the actual question. Why does surveying matter?

I have been thinking about this a lot, because it is the name of the newsletter.

Surveying matters because the work is not what people think it is.

Most of the public think a surveyor is a person who walks around a house with a damp meter and writes a report. That is a fraction of the job and only one discipline. What surveyors actually do, week in and week out, is translate technical reality into something a human being can understand and act on. That is not a small thing.

It also involves reading the room. Putting a stranger at ease in their own home during one of the most stressful moments of their life. Holding your ground while a landlord, a tenant, an agent, a contractor or a solicitor tries to push you off it. Remaining independent, impartial and professional when everyone around you has a commercial interest in a particular outcome. And in this heat – keeping a cool head!

None of that is technical.

It is a real skill, and it is honed over years. You do not get it from university. You do not get it from an apprenticeship in a fortnight. You build it, slowly, by turning up at hundreds of of client conversations and paying attention. A newly qualified surveyor of any route has not yet had that time, no matter how bright they are. That is not a criticism. It is simply the truth of how this kind of skill develops.

And it matters more now than it has ever mattered.

Which brings me, briefly, to AI

I try not to bring AI into every conversation, because there are already plenty of other places to do that. But I cannot ignore it here. The parts of surveying that are pattern-recognition, standard clauses, boilerplate report language and repetitive analysis are the parts most likely to be augmented, and in some cases automated, over the next few years.

The parts that will not be automated are exactly the parts I have been describing. Professional judgement, which is not technical in the sense people usually mean technical. Human communication. The ability to sit with a client through a difficult conversation and land it well. The ability to write a report that reads like it was written by someone who understood the person receiving it.

I have heard stories of surveyors who avoid these conversations. Who let the report do the talking because the client is difficult, or because the surveyor themselves finds the direct exchange uncomfortable. In the past, that has been a professional style choice. Going forward, I think it will become a professional liability.

The surveyors who thrive over the next ten years will not be the ones with the most sophisticated software. They will be the ones who can pick up the phone, hold a difficult conversation, translate a complicated situation into something a client can actually decide on, and remain trusted while doing it.

That is what makes surveying matter – not just the technical, but the significant human judgement that sits behind it.

We have moving from AI won’t replace to surveyors, to AI will augment surveying, to human judgement cannot be replaced by AI.

And that is what the podcast keeps confirming, one guest at a time.

Have a good weekend.

Nina