Why planning and development surveyors sit at the heart of every project
Posted on: 3 August, 2026
By Linda Serck
Ask most people who shapes a new housing development and they will probably point to planners, architects or developers. Yet behind every project that makes it from an idea on paper to a place where people can actually live is another professional whose role is less widely understood: the planning and development surveyor.
According to Tony Mulhall, Senior Specialist at RICS Land and Development, these professionals occupy a unique position in the development ecosystem. They are part planner, part commercial strategist, part negotiator and often part project manager, bringing together a wide range of specialists to ensure developments are not only desirable, but deliverable.
“The role of the planning and development surveyor can be seen in two ways,” he explains. “They have expertise across a wide range of areas relating to planning and development, or they act as project managers of other people’s expertise. They function in different ways depending on what their original skills are.”
That breadth is precisely what makes the profession so appealing to those who enjoy working across disciplines rather than being confined to a single specialism.
Cost and value
At its core, Tony says, planning and development surveying is about understanding one fundamental relationship: cost and value.
“They need to understand what it costs to deliver a development, and they need to understand what’s the value of that development. There you have the key issue relating to viability. The balancing of those two components, cost and value, determines whether you have a business case to develop or not.”
In other words, planning and development surveyors are the professionals who answer the question that ultimately determines whether a project proceeds: can this scheme actually work?
That means understanding everything from land values and construction costs to planning obligations, infrastructure requirements and market demand. It is a role that sits at the intersection of commercial reality and public policy.
What’s the difference?
Tony draws a clear distinction between traditional planning and planning and development surveying. While planners focus on policy, strategy and regulation, development surveyors focus on turning ambitions into realities.
“Planning and development surveyors operate in the implementation, not necessarily of the plan, but of the development sites which are located in the plan. It’s their job to make the numbers add up,” he says. “It’s the conversion of a planning goal or a planning objective into a business case that a developer would deliver.”
This is where the profession becomes particularly interesting. Development surveyors are constantly balancing competing priorities. They must consider the needs of developers, local communities, planners, politicians, investors and end users, often simultaneously.
Learn more about the University of the Built Environment’s MSc Urban Planning
“It’s making a lot of choices, making a lot of professional judgments about the combination in which you make those work,” Tony says. “You may not be able to satisfy, to the maximum, all of those requirements in a particular development. It is being able to make the professional judgement to optimise the combination of characteristics or components in a way that meets consumers’ requirements, but also meets developers’ requirements.”
Add planning authorities, Section 106 agreements, affordable housing obligations and environmental requirements to the equation, and the balancing act becomes even more complex.
The result is a career that demands both analytical thinking and strong people skills. A planning and development surveyor may spend one day reviewing viability assessments and the next negotiating affordable housing contributions, discussing biodiversity net gain, or coordinating discussions about water and electricity infrastructure.
The long road to planning approval
Tony describes projects that can take years to navigate through the planning process.
“Some of these projects run for a long time through the planning system in terms of negotiations. They’re taking two or three years to get a planning application through local authorities. That’s a long time negotiating this week on biodiversity net gain, negotiating next week on affordable housing, finding that the water company has a problem supplying water and now the electricity company has difficulty supplying electricity. These are the strands that have to be pulled together.”
For students considering their future, that variety is one of the profession’s greatest attractions. Few careers offer exposure to such a wide spectrum of expertise.
“If you talk about planning and development, you will have in a meeting an ecologist sitting at one end of the table and an energy specialist sitting at the other end,” says Tony. “You’ve got to make sense of all of this stuff.”
Diverse career opportunities
That diversity is also reflected in career opportunities. While some graduates move into specialist consultancies, others work directly for major housebuilders, commercial developers, utilities companies or strategic land promoters.
“Any company involved in advancing land for development would benefit from having a planning and development surveyor,” Tony says.
The work can begin years before a site is built. Development surveyors are often involved in strategic land promotion, helping identify future development opportunities, assembling sites and guiding projects through planning systems that can take five years or more.
No need to be a maths brainbox
Importantly, the profession is not reserved for number-crunching specialists. While financial literacy is important, Tony is keen to dispel the myth that aspiring development surveyors need advanced mathematical skills.
“There’s a sense that planning and development surveyors are more comfortable dealing with financial numbers,” he says. “But there’s no mystery about any of this stuff. This is all straightforward. It doesn’t require extraordinary mathematical capabilities; it’s pretty basic stuff.”
What matters more is commercial awareness and curiosity about how places are created.
“People who have a business interest” are often well suited to the profession, he notes, because development is ultimately a business activity. Understanding how projects are funded, how risk is managed and how investment decisions are made is just as important as understanding planning policy.
Digital planning and AI
At the same time, the profession is developing rapidly. Digital planning, data analytics and artificial intelligence are opening new pathways for graduates entering the sector.
Tony believes future professionals may come from an increasingly diverse range of educational backgrounds. New entrants with digital, analytical and technological expertise are likely to reshape how development projects are assessed and delivered over the coming years.
‘Be curious’
For prospective master’s students, perhaps the most compelling aspect of planning and development surveying is the chance to influence the places people live, work and spend their lives.
As Tony puts it: “It’s somebody who needs to be curious about what’s going on in cities. If you ever wondered why cities grow in the way they grow, and thought that they should have grown in a different way, and wanted to be part of the sector that engages with that, then planning and development will be a really good area to pursue. You’d have extraordinary diversity. You would be involved in work which is absolutely essential to the places we live in.”
For those seeking a career that combines planning, property, finance, negotiation, sustainability and placemaking, it may be one of the built environment’s best-kept secrets. Behind every successful development sits someone making sense of competing demands, bringing specialists together and ensuring ambitious ideas can become real places. More often than not, that person is a planning and development surveyor.
Help to make a change – learn more about the University of the Built Environment’s MSc Urban Planning
