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Inform Surveying Ltd

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Inform Surveying Ltd

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Inform Surveying is a trusted UK-based firm specialising in property consultancy, chartered building surveying, and project management. Regulated by the RICS.

Chartered Building Surveyors & Project Managers covering all aspects of Commercial and Residential property.

26/10/2026

Work harder, they say. Or is it work smarter? Either way, where's the evaluation? Where's the honesty?

That's the honest version of the productivity conversation, and it has very little to do with how many days a week someone sits at a desk. Since 2008, UK output sits around 14% below its pre-crisis trend, while total hours worked sit around 5% above theirs. Sheffield produces £35.20 of output an hour, against a UK average of £41.30.

Getting people back to their desks was never going to fix that on its own. The figures do suggest people are productive at home, but that's not the full story. The evidence points to capital investment, management quality, and how easily a city's workforce can reach itself as the real levers behind productivity. And when people are in the office, it's the quality of the space that decides whether the trip was worth it, to the employer, and to the person giving up family time to make it.

Two of those levers are property questions. Worth remembering next time attendance gets blamed for a problem it didn't cause.

Honesty starts with trusting people to know what works for them and the business, then giving them the opportunity. Nobody who's never had an easy journey in, or a quiet space to do real work once they arrive, is going to feel much enthusiasm for being told to come back.

26/10/2026

When neighbours disagree, who's on your side

It's a fair question, and the honest answer isn't simply "your surveyor".

A party wall surveyor's duty, whether appointed by you, by your neighbour, or jointly as an Agreed Surveyor, runs to the Act, not to whoever happens to be paying the fee. That's a statutory position, not a courtesy.

What appointing your own surveyor does give you is someone who advises you directly and makes sure your position is properly put and understood. That's real and it's valuable. It just isn't advocacy in the way a solicitor acting for you would be.

Understanding that distinction up front avoids a frustrating conversation later, when a surveyor you appointed makes a determination you don't like, and reminds you, correctly, that their duty was never to agree with you.

www.informsurveying.co.uk

26/10/2026

Health and safety on a live construction project isn't paperwork. It's the difference between a project that runs safely and one that doesn't, and it's decided long before the first spade goes in the ground.

As Principal Designer for The Company Shop in Darlington, our role centred on the pre-construction phase, making sure the right health and safety management procedures were in place and ready before the Principal Contractor took over delivery on site. That groundwork is easy to underestimate and expensive to get wrong. Getting it wrong at this stage doesn't just mean the issues get covered up, it means the risks don't disappear. They just surface later, on site, when they're harder and more costly to manage.

In practice, that meant gathering all the pertinent project information from the outset and advising on any further investigations required, asbestos surveys included, to build a genuinely detailed picture of the site before work began. From there, we developed a comprehensive Pre-Construction Information package to hand to the Principal Contractor, giving them everything needed to plan the works safely from day one rather than discovering gaps mid-project.

Throughout, we worked closely with designers to eliminate, reduce and control foreseeable health and safety risks to anyone affected by the works, following the hierarchy that CDM 2015 sets out: remove the risk entirely where possible, and where it can't be removed, control it properly. We handled the regulatory submissions this project required too, preparing and submitting the F10 form to the HSE, and closed the loop by preparing the Health and Safety file at project completion, the record that carries the site's safety history forward for whoever manages the building next.

No shortcuts. No gaps. Just the regulatory rigour every project deserves, whether anyone's watching or not, because that's the only standard that actually protects people on site.

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Talk to Nick Cammack MRICS about Principal Designer (CDM) support: [email protected]

23/10/2026

Agreed Surveyor vs two surveyors

Once a dispute is deemed to have arisen, there are two routes. Both owners can appoint a single Agreed Surveyor, or each owner appoints their own and the two surveyors select a third at the outset.

An Agreed Surveyor acts impartially for both owners. It is not the building owner's surveyor covering both roles under a different name, and that distinction matters, because a nervous adjoining owner will assume otherwise if nobody explains it.

Both routes are open every time, but the agreed route isn't automatically the better one. It works where all three of the people involved are satisfied it suits the job: the two owners and the surveyor. Nobody can be made to accept an Agreed Surveyor appointment, and where the work is technically difficult, or the neighbours are already at odds, a surveyor who can see that coming is right to decline it. Worth knowing too that there's no third surveyor sitting behind an Agreed Surveyor to refer a disagreement to, and if that appointment falls away the whole process starts again from the beginning.

One more thing before you choose. Once an appointment is made in writing, neither owner can rescind it. It sticks for the duration of the dispute, so it's worth getting the choice right at the start rather than assuming you can switch later.

Where neighbours are on good terms and the job is straightforward, an Agreed Surveyor often works well and costs less. Where there's doubt, distrust or real technical difficulty, two surveyors is the safer route.

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www.informsurveying.co.uk

19/10/2026

Relocating a growing business is never just about the move. It's about landing somewhere that can grow with you, on a timeline that doesn't wait for anyone.

Zoo Digital brought us in to guide the entire relocation of their Sheffield head office, appointing us as Lead Consultant and Employers Agent across a genuinely full-service brief: dilapidation assessment and management of the reinstatement works on the outgoing premises, Contract Administration of the reinstatement works there, and management of the complete fit-out at the new site. Rather than managing each strand in isolation, we treated the relocation as a single connected process, because that's how it actually plays out for the business living through it.

We started by working alongside the client's agent, design team and internal staff to build a genuine understanding of Zoo Digital's needs, timescales and budget, the foundation everything else was built on. With restrictive timescales in play from the lease conditions on the old premises, we made the call to proceed with the incumbent contractor rather than lose time to a fresh procurement process, and facilitated the negotiations and detailed liaison with the retained designer needed to see the contract package through to completion.

Working within a multi-tenancy building brought its own set of technical challenges that had to be managed alongside everyone else's schedules and requirements in the same block. And because Zoo Digital's business kept growing while the project was underway, we accommodated various design changes along the way, including significantly larger accommodation than originally scoped, to give the client room for continued expansion rather than a space they'd outgrow within months of moving in.

£900k. Delivered within budget. Delivered within the fixed timescales required to meet the relocation deadline set by the former lease.

That's what full-service property advice looks like when it's built around the client's actual trajectory, not just the terms of a single contract.

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19/10/2026

A building nobody occupies deteriorates. So does an organisation.

This is the part of the return to office conversation most people never hear, because it's a surveyor's point, not an HR one.

Aviva's own loss prevention standard requires an unoccupied building to be inspected inside and out at least every seven days, water isolated and drained, heating held on a frost stat. Allianz treats a building as unoccupied after 45 consecutive days out of active use, and requires it to be reported.

A half empty office isn't a cheaper one. Full rates, full plant, half the people, and nobody walking the floor to catch the leak before it becomes a claim.

The same is true of teams. An organisation that's never in the room loses its own maintenance schedule too: the coaching, the correction, the wellbeing checks, the catch-ups, the sharing of ideas, the small things that get caught before they become expensive, or a quiet drain on time that costs productivity.

More on that next.

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19/10/2026

The office doesn't have a home working problem. It has a 17mph problem.

Abbeydale Road, the A621, carries the worst delay of any A road in Sheffield. It runs at an average of 17.0mph across the year, and the morning peak is worse than that.

Across the city, local A roads average 20.6mph against 24.0 for England, and they've slowed every year since 2020.

The result: only 39% of Sheffield residents, 326,000 people, can reach the city centre within 30 minutes on the current transport network. In comparable European cities, that figure is closer to 80%.

An employer taking space in Sheffield city centre is reasonably buying access to 326,000 people, not the wider city's 850,000. The catchment is the demand, and therefore the product. People bring opportunity, spending and vibrancy, and that's what gives the real estate market the confidence to invest. Everything else is fit-out.

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19/10/2026

Serving your own party wall notice

The Act puts the duty to serve notice on the building owner, and nothing in it says a surveyor has to do it for you. So some owners draft and serve their own notices, sometimes on the advice of their contractor or architect.

It rarely goes right. A homemade notice seldom goes out correctly or without issues, and those issues cause misunderstanding with the neighbour. The process starts on the wrong footing.

It rarely saves money either. If and when surveyors do get involved, it takes them longer to assess what was served and sort it out, so the saving rarely survives.

Most architects know this now. Unless party wall work is a specialism of theirs, they rarely advise on notices or get involved in serving them.

If you're planning work near a boundary, get advice from a party wall surveyor before any notice goes out. It's always the right first step.

www.informsurveying.co.uk

05/10/2026

The Party Wall Act protects you, not just them.

It's easy to assume the Party Wall Act exists purely to slow a building owner down. It doesn't. It's what makes certain works legally possible in the first place. Cutting into a shared wall, for instance, isn't something you're entitled to do without it.

For the adjoining owner, there's a practical point most people miss. In most cases the building owner pays your surveyor's reasonable fees, not you. Adjoining owners often assume appointing a surveyor will cost them money, so they do nothing and end up with no protection once work starts next door.

The Act isn't red tape bolted onto development. It's what lets development happen with the neighbour properly protected, and usually at no direct cost to that neighbour.

www.informsurveying.co.uk

05/10/2026

Sheffield hasn't got an empty office problem.

It has a shortage of good ones.

New and Grade A office vacancy in Sheffield city centre sits at 1.48%, with nothing at all under construction between now and 2028. In the same year, the council put Moorfoot, the city's largest office, on the market for conversion to around 320 homes.

Both of those are true at once. Employers aren't refusing city centre space. They're refusing the space that no longer works, and paying more for less of the space that does.

The question worth asking isn't home versus office. It's what a building has to do to earn the journey in.

Source: Knight Frank, Q2 2026

Address

102-103 Hague, Park Hill, South Street
Sheffield
S25AS

Opening Hours

Monday	9am - 5:30pm
Tuesday	9am - 5:30pm
Wednesday	9am - 5:30pm
Thursday	9am - 5:30pm
Friday	9am - 5:30pm

Telephone

+441143219919

Website

http://informsurveying.co.uk/

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