Find a Surveyor - RICS Firm FAQs

In September 2019, RICS moved to a new Professional Portal. We have been informed by RICS Regulation that some firms have not registered office locations for regulation with RICS using the new process. The rules and technical functionality of Find a Surveyor have not changed. 

In order to return these offices to regulated status you need to contact RICS Regulation team by completing this form and sending it via email to regulation@rics.org and state that you wish these offices to be subject to RICS regulation.

Please note that new rules regarding firm regulation came into force in April 2020. Please check here for more information: Manage your firm regulation

For all queries please email supportricsfas@rics.org.

Queries related to changes of address details, telephone numbers, email addresses, employee details etc. are all made by RICS’ Contact Centre in Coventry which is RICS’ main customer service operation.

Any queries which cannot be resolved by the Contact Centre are then passed to either RICS’ technical team (if they are technical problems) or to Sunday Publishing (if they are sales queries). The Contact Centre acts as a triage to direct enquiries to the correct teams in the shortest possible time. The Contact Centre will acknowledge all enquiries within 48 hours.

You do not have to pay to appear on Find a Surveyor.

Find a Surveyor lists firms which provide an independent surveying service to the public or business and employ at least one qualified Chartered Surveyor or Associate RICS member. RICS believes the public and business are best served by choosing an RICS regulated firm. Find a Surveyor only displays surveying firms which are regulated by RICS unless the user chooses to deselect this option.

All surveying firms are offered a Basic listing on the website once they are added to the RICS database. Each year we send out a renewal form to all member firms. When you complete this form, you will automatically be upgraded from a Basic listing to a Standard listing.  Both the Basic and the Standard listing are free. From this point, you then have the option of purchasing an Advantage or Showcase Package to further enhance your profile.

Packages:

Advantage Package

• Enhance your listing with added website and logo to better promote your brand and maximise enquiries.
• A personalised ‘about us’ enables you to display your range of services and make a feature of your specialties and areas covered.

Showcase Package

• Showcase your company with a fully branded profile page, including custom colours and header image
• Your profile page has extra features, such as tabs to let you go into more detail about your company as well as a unique contact form

Find a Surveyor uses Google geo-location to order results it delivers. Google geolocation takes the centre point of the user’s search location (eg postcode, town, city, borough and county) and lists surveying offices by their proximity to that centre point.

Similar to Google search results firms appear higher in the list by paying to become a “premium listing” (this option was called a “Featured listing” on previous versions of the site). Where more than one “premium listing” is included in search results these are then ordered by their proximity to the centre point of the users search location.

Google geo-location looks for addresses in our database of firms which fall within a rectangle extending from the centre point of the search.

Sometimes the rectangle will overlap with bordering towns and counties causing firms outside the area to appear in search results. The illustration above shows that in order to accommodate the county of Nottinghamshire in its entirety, some parts of bordering counties are included in the search results. Assuming the search was purely for “Nottinghamshire” then all surveying firms within the red box would be included in the results which are then ordered by premium listings and proximity to the central marker point. Additionally firms who practice in a location but do not have a physical office within it can pay to be included in the search results for that location.

A ‘Surveying Service’ is the surveying specialism you can provide to a consumer. To help consumers, we have enabled the option to filter location searches by the surveying services they require. Surveying Services are paid for by firms. By charging we deter firms from adding surveying service they do not provide in order to receive more enquiries for business, this has happened in the past and resulted in numerous complaints from users. To let a user know what ‘Surveying Service’ you can offer please contact our sales agency Sunday Publishing on 020 7101 2773 or email  findasurveyor@wearesunday.com.

We are keen that the details we keep on firms in our database are up to date. If your details need updating, please contact findasurveyor@wearesunday.com. If you are interested in further enhancing your listing and including more information about your firm then please contact our sales agency Sunday Publishing on 020 7101 2773 or email findasurveyor@wearesunday.com.

If your firm isn’t displayed in search results then you may be making a search which is too narrow. Please de-select any surveying services you have chosen and run the search again. If you still do not appear in search results please broaden the geographical area in which you are searching (eg using just the sector postcode SW1P rather than the full postcode SW1P 3AD).

If your firm still doesn’t appear when all surveying specialisms are de-selected and your geographical search has been broadened then please contact findasurveyor@wearesunday.com.

The default setting for the user is to search for Regulated firms. Regulated firms are those that are signed up to the RICS Rules of Conduct for Firms, and are regulated and monitored by RICS to ensure that they meet the highest standards. To provide the best service to the consumer, RICS encourages the public to use the services of a firm that it regulates.

You must register for RICS regulation if you are a firm that offers surveying services to third parties and where 50% or more of the principals are RICS members. Firms that offer surveying services to third parties and have less than 50% (but at least one) of their principals as RICS members can opt to be regulated. For more information on regulation please visit the RICS.org website or email regulation@rics.org.

The member directory is used to find an individual chartered surveyor and is designed as a peer-to-peer networking tool and to validate that an individual is an RICS Member. Find a Surveyor is used to locate a surveying firm in a particular geographical area, and is designed as a business generation tool.

57% of our web traffic comes from web search of which 80% comes from Google. RICSFirms.com appears on the first page of Google search results for the most commonly used consumer search terms.

By far the largest source of referrals is our main website rics.org which is visited by over 4 million users per year. At the bottom of every page on rics.org you find a search bar titled “Find a surveying firm”. Searches from these pages on rics.org send users to results pages in Find a Surveyor and generates around 20% of all Find a Surveyor traffic.

Find A Surveyor receives an average of 71,500 users per month*.  Find a Surveyor has delivered the contact details of surveying firms to users over a million times.

*Figures taken from Google Analytics August 2021 - July 2022.

Sunday Publishing is the sales agency contracted by RICS to manage sales of firm listings enhancements, advertising and editorial content on Find a Surveyor. They are authorised to operate on our behalf to ensure that firms can access the marketing profile opportunities they wish in a timely and professional way.

You can contact Sunday on 020 7101 2773 or email  findasurveyor@wearesunday.com.