Building Surveyor / Employer's Agent - Development Monitoring / Recovery & Special Situations

Senior Building Surveyor / Employer’s Agent – Development Monitoring / Recovery & Special Situations

London / Hybrid / Remote

Senior / Associate Director

£65,000–£85,000 + bonus (can go higher for exceptional / Director level hires)

If you have spent your career solving difficult construction problems, this could be one of the more interesting roles you will come across.

This is not a conventional Building Surveying position.

You’ll join a highly regarded specialist Development Monitoring consultancy that advises banks and development lenders on construction projects across the UK.

An increasing part of their work now involves projects where something has gone wrong and the lender needs considerably more than a standard monthly monitoring report.

A contractor may have failed. A developer may be in difficulty. There may be quality issues, health and safety concerns, incomplete works or simply a project where nobody is quite sure what the real position is.

That is where you come in.

The Role

You’ll work on distressed, problematic and unusual developments, in London and further afield at times, helping establish what is happening and what needs to happen next.

Depending on the project, the work could include:

• Contract Administration;
• Employer’s Agent duties;
• Clerk of Works / quality inspections;
• reviewing building contracts and consultant appointments;
• assessing defects and workmanship;
• health and safety monitoring;
• programme and construction risk;
• working with contractors, developers, lenders and professional teams;
• helping establish a practical route through to completion;
• producing clear written advice for lenders and other stakeholders.

Every instruction can be different.

You may be brought into a development after a contractor has failed, where work needs inspecting and a completion strategy agreed. On another project, the lender may simply need an experienced technical person to get underneath the information being presented and establish the true position.

There is also likely to be an element of Development Monitoring.

You don’t necessarily need to be an experienced Development Monitoring Surveyor, but an understanding of what Development Monitoring involves — or previous exposure to lender-funded development and monitoring work — would be highly beneficial.

The consultancy’s core business is Development Monitoring, so an appreciation of the lender’s perspective, risk, reporting and the importance of protecting the funder’s position will be valuable.

About You

The ideal background would be an experienced Building Surveyor or Employer’s Agent with broad construction and development experience.

Someone who started in Building Surveying and has subsequently moved towards Employer’s Agent, Project Management or project delivery work could be particularly well suited.

You should understand:

• building contracts;
• Contract Administration;
• construction methodology and sequencing;
• defects and quality;
• health and safety;
• procurement and programme;
• contractor and consultant responsibilities.

Most importantly, you need to be a pragmatic problem solver.

This isn’t a role for somebody whose experience sits entirely within one narrow specialism. You need enough breadth to arrive on an unfamiliar development, understand the issues, ask the right questions and help determine a sensible way forward.

MRICS or MCIOB would be advantageous, with the level of appointment ultimately reflecting your experience.

The Opportunity

The business already has an excellent reputation in Development Monitoring and is seeing increasing demand from banks and lenders for help with distressed and unusual developments.

For somebody from a Building Surveying or Employer’s Agent background, it offers the opportunity to use those skills in a very different environment.

Instead, the work is varied, senior, client-facing and genuinely problem-led.

If the difficult projects are usually the ones you find most interesting, this could suit you extremely well.

Click Apply or get in touch for a confidential conversation with Andrew Pearson at EC Property Recruitment. My contact number is 07940 597 931, and you can find all my details on LinkedIn.