Equity side
You have capital in a scheme somebody else is running. There may already be a monitoring surveyor on the project, appointed by the lender and reporting to the lender. Nobody in that structure is looking at your position.
The problem
A development is funded by debt and equity, and they are not exposed equally. Debt is secured and ranks first. Equity ranks last, which means it absorbs the whole of any shortfall before the lender loses a penny.
That is the ordinary structure and it is not unfair. What follows from it is less obvious. The monitoring surveyor on the facility is appointed by the lender to protect the lender, and their question is whether the debt remains covered. A scheme can pass that test comfortably while the equity return has already gone.
So the reports you are shown are real, competent and answering somebody else’s question. By the time a lender’s monitoring surveyor raises an alarm, the margin that was yours has usually been consumed some time earlier.
The gap is not information. It is that nobody in the structure is measuring the thing you own.
Who instructs us
These instructions have one thing in common: the money is committed to a project the investor does not run day to day.
Capital deployed into development, often alongside a developer who is trusted and whose numbers have never been independently tested. The requirement is rarely suspicion. It is that nobody in the office reads a cost plan for a living.
Equity in a scheme run by a partner, with returns depending on a build cost the partner controls and reports. The exposure is to margin rather than to drawdown, and margin is not what the lender’s surveyor is watching.
Where capital has been raised from others, the oversight obligation runs both ways. An independent position on cost is what allows a manager to report to investors on something firmer than the developer’s own summary.
What you get
The build cost inside the appraisal decides the land price and the margin. We test it against measured scope, state what it excludes, and say plainly whether the figure supports the return you were shown.
The useful number is not what has been spent, it is what remains to be spent. Those two diverge quietly, and the divergence is visible months before the money runs out if anybody is calculating it.
A monthly position on the equity return rather than on the drawdown, including changes instructed but not yet valued, and contingency released without a matching risk closing out.
Whether to inject, to renegotiate, to press for a change in the scheme, or to do nothing. Reports that describe without concluding are the ones nobody acts on.
Services
The monitoring discipline, applied to your position rather than to a lender’s.
Testing whether the figure behind the appraisal was ever supportable.
Measuring what has actually been built, rather than what has been claimed.
Where a scheme ends badly and the account has to be defended.
Where you want the full commercial appointment rather than oversight alone.
Where the instruction comes from the debt rather than the equity.
Questions
Because that surveyor acts for the lender. Their question is whether the debt stays covered, and a scheme can answer that comfortably while the equity return has already gone. Nothing about their work is wrong. It is simply not addressed to you.
It should not, and where it does that is itself information. A developer confident in their numbers usually welcomes an independent position, because it settles questions that would otherwise sit unresolved between partners. We report on the position rather than on people.
The cost plan, the building contract, the monthly valuations and applications, the change register and the programme. Site attendance where the works justify it. Where access is refused or the documents do not exist, that is the finding.
Yes, and that is when a good share of these instructions arrive. The first output is a reconciliation of where the position genuinely stands. The options narrow as a job progresses, so the value of the exercise falls the longer it is deferred.
Not on the same scheme. We act for one side of a project only. Where both approach us about one project we take the first instruction and decline the second.
Ongoing oversight is usually a monthly retainer scaled to the size of the scheme and the reporting cycle. A one off review, for example testing a cost plan before capital is committed, is a fixed sum. The basis is agreed and written down before anything begins.
Insights
