When you’re buying a flat or a house, do you know who took and calculated the floor plan measurements you’re relying on? Unless you’re an estate agent, you’ll probably be shocked to learn it’s typically the estate agent’s freelance photographer, not a trained surveyor or property measurer. Calling in a costly chartered surveyor when you’re buying or selling, say, an average 2-bedroom flat in Wandsworth feels like overkill for most people. And it probably is.

Or at least it was. Because the gulf in cost and rigour between what a photographer from an estate agent can do versus what it costs to obtain a Spec Verified floor plan of a property is being turned on its head by Spec’s advanced technologies that rapidly and accurately capture and measure properties. And the technological shift that we’re part of is also starting to point to a step-change in the way chartered surveyors will approach their role too.

Where we were:

To help unpack all that, let’s go back a few steps into the 150 year old world of chartered surveyors.

If you’ve got a construction project, building or piece of land you want to survey, measure and value, you call in a chartered surveyor. Days or weeks later, depending on availability, as many as three people will turn up to survey and take all the measurements they need, using kit that can cost well into six figures.

Then a week or so after that, all the measurements will have been processed, the findings evaluated, and you get an RICS certified report along with the hard-earned advice and recommendations of your professional chartered surveyor on what all this means for you.

There are plenty of positives to things being done this way. Deep property knowledge; consultancy from a regulated professional; advice that can be relied upon and is supported by Professional Indemnity insurance; accurate standards-based measurement and calculation. That’s why, when a lot is riding on the outcome, property surveying and measurement has been done this way for a very long time. But when technology can do the heavy lifting, it makes accurate, reliable and trustworthy measurement accessible to everyone at high speed, with fast turnaround and low cost.

Then, out will go the need to use teams of people to gather and process measurements. Out will go turnaround times that take days rather than a few hours, or even minutes. And out will go the chances of human error. Meanwhile, in will come the time and space to apply the intuitive power of the human mind to evaluate and think creatively to solve clients’ problems using data reliably collected and calculated.

At which point — and the clock is ticking fast by the way — it’ll pay to be ahead of the curve.

Where we’re going:

Spec measures internal spaces using industrial hardware combined with proprietary software algorithms and computer vision. We do it by recording millions of accurate laser-generated data-points in every space — no matter how unusual the shape — and processing the data in the cloud with our advanced algorithms. The raw measurements are sub-centimetre accurate, everything is turned around in under 24 hours and the digital assets you get include Spec Verified floor plans (accurately calculated to RICS standards and insured for up to £10 million), a measurement report, professional photography, 360 and VR experiences — and it all costs around £49.

Now this isn’t a Ridley Scott movie — a flying tennis ball doesn’t arrive at your door and float around each room. We send in a Digital Surveyor instead (they do have lasers though). The job of Digital Surveyor is a new one Spec have created that specifically addresses the potential and changing role of technology in measuring and calculating property data. Digital Surveyors are detail-oriented people who are concerned with delivering exceptionally accurate measurement — to capture the reality of a property as it is, not how an unscrupulous agent might wish it to be. They deploy advanced, rapid-capture laser hardware, set up and oversee the scan journey, tag and augment data so that the Spec platform collects everything it needs for the algorithms to process. We’re in the business of capturing the objective, absolutely precise data about a property and getting it into the hands of the people who need it most.

Our Digital Surveyors, hardware and software do the painstakingly accurate measurement and calculation work so expensive chartered surveyors don’t have to (and so anyone with £49 can have a Spec property capture).

Where humans fit in:

Because as brilliant as it is, most state-of-the-art AI is ‘dumb’ — for the moment at least. That means it’s fantastic at joining the dots between superficially related data-points, identifying patterns it’s expecting. But it simply cannot come close to humans for general-purpose reasoning, creative thinking and taking leaps of inspiration.

A big part of our role used to be about measuring and assessing. If technology can now do that job, faster with greater accuracy and robotic diligence, what is our role for the future?

All of which puts us at a shift point, an existential challenge for surveyors: “a big part of our role used to be about measuring and assessing. If technology can now do that job, faster with greater accuracy and robotic diligence, what is our role for the future?” I believe the answer is around doing the things ‘dumb’ AI can’t do — using human intelligence and chaining together experience, memory, instinct and creativity to make leaps of intuition and judgement, find those complex solutions that computer algorithms can’t because you can’t programme them for every eventuality.   A professional chartered surveyor has an amazing piece of hardware between their ears and we are a long way short of replicating that right now with AI. So the long-term value of a human, property professional is in how to use accurate data to get the best from the built environment as an asset.

And that will become increasingly the case as tools and technology give skilled professionals more capacity to ask and solve the big questions. By arriving at the sort of human-powered, subjective decisions and applications that are currently hard to achieve with AI.

We see technology like Spec opening up new markets where increasingly the lines between commercial and consumer products and services will blur now that you can access survey grade measurement without the costs of collection and calculation.

Perhaps there are parallels between chartered surveyors and lawyers or accountants. Where years of training and hard-won knowledge make professionals naturally more excited to take on the big, juicy cases, they’ll also now have more opportunities to apply all that knowledge and training to a higher volume of smaller jobs, as the kind of time consuming preparatory work that was once part of their (unfulfilling, unchallenging) bread and butter becomes increasingly faster and automated.

For example, if you’re selling a 2-bedroom flat in the suburbs five years from now, and want to know how much value an extension would add, it won’t feel like overkill or cost the earth to acquire the Spec Verified floor plan to underpin some expert advice.

We live in an era where the pace of change is getting faster all the time. New capabilities are emerging all the time because the underlying hardware and software is getting more powerful. It wouldn’t have been possible ten years ago to capture and process 50m data points of a property and turn it around in under 24hrs without an unattainably large computer resource. But the technology we’re working with now means Spec can do some of those jobs on a mobile phone.

We’re as interested as anyone in helping evolve what it means to be a chartered surveyor. It’s why at Spec we work so closely with the RICS to implement and refine their measurement standards and develop new certifications for Spec’s teams of Digital Surveyors as RICS Certified Property Measurers. The right technology, professionally applied will augment what surveyors (and estate agents) can do in the future.

We see the future of surveyors as a partnership with technology where their value is in being quickly and accurately informed so they can deliver exceptional human consultancy and advice. Spec Digital Surveyors are at the forefront of the revolution in measuring and acquiring the raw data that people throughout the property chain can trust and make the best use of.

If you are planning home improvements, request a Spec of your home and get your property report with Spec Verified mm-accurate room measurements. To find out more please email hello@spec.co.