18
Aug
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Andrew McColl - Chairman - 18 August 2026
Blog
Three Weeks to Put Your Practice on the National Stage
Entries for The Negotiator Awards' two surveying categories close at midnight on 6 September 2026. Free to enter, open right across the residential surveying profession, and genuinely worth three evenings of your time. Here is how to make it count.
There is one date I would like you to put in your diary, and another I would like you to beat.
The first is Friday 27 November 2026, the black tie gala dinner at Grosvenor House on Park Lane where the winners of The Negotiator Awards are announced, including the two categories that now belong to our profession.
The second is midnight on 6 September 2026. That is when entries close, and it is the only one of the two dates that asks anything of you this month.
So you have just under three weeks. That is comfortably enough time, and I will show you exactly how to use it. But it is all the time there is. This deadline has already been extended once, and the organisers have stated in terms that there will be no further extensions. If you had the original mid-August date in your diary and it slipped past you, consider this an unexpected reprieve. If you are hearing about all of this for the first time, you have lost nothing at all, and you are reading this at precisely the right moment.
Why I keep banging on about this
Last November I stood on the stage at Grosvenor House, under those famous chandeliers, in a room of around a thousand property professionals, and watched something I had wanted for years finally happen. Surveyors took centre stage at The Negotiator Awards. For the first time in the history of these awards our profession had its own categories, and the first winners in surveying's history were crowned that night.
What mattered was not who won. What mattered was that it happened at all, and that it was not a closed shop. These categories were not, and are not, an RPSA members' club. They are open right across the residential surveying profession, and the RPSA's job is to champion the whole of that profession, not merely the part of it that pays us a subscription. Seeing surveyors of every background recognised on a national stage is precisely the sort of thing we exist for.
So the categories are back for 2026, entry is open right now, and you have just under three weeks.
The two categories, and which one is yours
There are two routes in, and the dividing line is the size of your practice. This is deliberate. It means the brilliant solo surveyor is not pitched head to head against a well resourced national firm. Each category is judged on its own merits, against its own pool of competitors.
Supplier of the Year: Independent Surveyor
This is for solo practitioners and micro practices of up to five surveyors.
If you are the sort of surveyor who answers your own phone, knows your clients by name, and quietly changes how house buyers on your patch experience the whole business of moving, this is your category. It rewards dedication, deep client focus, and the kind of tangible, on the ground impact that larger operations sometimes struggle to match.
Do not for a moment read "small" as "small fry". The judges are looking for surveyors who punch above their weight, who have turned personal service into a genuine competitive advantage, and who have the evidence to prove it. This category specifically asks for five client testimonials, so the people you have helped become your strongest possible advocates. Start asking them today.
Supplier of the Year: Surveying Firm
This is for practices of six or more surveyors.
It rewards firms that have pulled off the difficult trick of growing without losing the human touch, that are innovating in how surveys are produced and delivered, and that are setting service standards their competitors quietly try to copy.
Larger firms have different stories to tell, and the judges know it. Here they are weighing team development and training, technology adoption, quality assurance that actually scales, client communication at volume, and the cultural glue that holds a growing practice together. If you have invested in better reporting software, brought in junior surveyors and trained them properly, achieved client retention figures your competitors would envy, or built a reputation for the sort of consistency only a well run team delivers, those are the threads to pull on.
If you are genuinely unsure which category fits, particularly if you are sitting right on the boundary, the Negotiator team will point you in the right direction at entries@thenegotiator.co.uk. Ask them. It costs nothing and it is better than guessing.
One point of eligibility, stated properly
I want to be precise about this, because I have seen it paraphrased loosely elsewhere, including by me.
These categories are not restricted to RPSA members. They are open across the residential surveying profession. What they do require is that entrants are accredited members of a recognised professional body, and the awards name RPSA, RICS, CIOB, CABE, ISSE and SAVA among them.
So "open to everyone" is right in spirit and wrong in the detail. The accurate version is that your accreditation route does not matter, but you do need one. For the overwhelming majority of people reading this, that is a box already ticked.
What the judges actually rewarded last year
This is the part I would read twice, because the published judges' comments are the closest thing you will get to seeing the mark scheme.
In the Independent Surveyor category, Gold went to 840 Property and Surveying Services, with Trew Surveying taking Silver and Complete Inspection Surveyors Bronze. The Good Surveyor and Ashton Lee Surveyors were Highly Commended. The judges said of the winner that they were "demonstrating how to marry delivering complex technical information with excellent client care", and that the submission showed a real passion for surveying and for raising standards.
Read that again. Not the biggest practice. Not the cleverest technology. The ability to take genuinely difficult technical material and land it well with a client who is frightened and out of their depth, which is, when you strip everything else away, the actual job.
In the Surveying Firm category, Gold went to the Novello Group, with Holdens Chartered Surveyors and Building Consultancy taking Silver and Houzecheck Bronze. The judges highlighted the approach to bringing a struggling firm in house, upskilling and retaining the staff, and returning that business to profitability, alongside excellent testimonials and a client portal for agents and solicitors that they found particularly interesting.
Again, note what impressed them. People developed and kept. A business rescued. A practical tool that made life easier for the people at the other end of the transaction. Not a single line about being the cheapest or the fastest.
If you are wondering what a winning entry looks like, that is your brief.
How to build an entry that gets shortlisted
The mechanics matter more than most people assume, so let me be direct about them.
You are judged entirely on what you submit. The judges will not go looking for more information about you. They may contact you to verify what you have claimed, but they will not fill in your gaps. Whatever is not on the page does not exist.
Use all 500 words in every field. You have five or six criteria fields, each capped at 500 words, plus a free form section for supporting material. The organisers say plainly that a good, shortlist-qualifying entry uses the full allocation. Half a field of modest, understated prose is the single most common way good practices lose to lesser ones. This is not the moment for British reticence.
Evidence every claim. Saying your team is great is worth nothing. Showing it is worth everything. The things that count:
- Client testimonials, five of them for the independent category
- Google and Trustpilot reviews, with the ratings and volumes
- CPD records, qualifications, professional body memberships, redress and CMP scheme registrations
- Response time evidence, taken from your own systems rather than your own memory
- Case studies, especially a complex defect diagnosis you unravelled or a difficult client situation you turned around
- Metrics showing year on year growth, and financial information if you are willing (not mandatory, held in confidence, and it strengthens a case considerably)
- Marketing materials, videos, infographics, and anything that shows how you present yourself
Draft it offline first. Write your answers in a plain text file, get a colleague to read them with fresh eyes, then paste them into the portal once you are all content. The entry pages can time out, and there are few experiences in professional life more dispiriting than watching a polished 500 word answer disappear. Save as you go, every time.
Be accurate. The judges reserve the right to verify anything you tell them, and by entering you give them permission to do so. That should not worry a single honest surveyor, but it is worth saying out loud: this is an exercise in evidenced professionalism, not creative writing.
Three evenings, and you are done
Just under three weeks sounds tight. It is not, if you break it up. Here is how I would attack it.
Evening one. Register your account, choose your category, and read the guidance properly. Then send the testimonial requests, because those are the only part of this you cannot do alone and they need time to come back. Nothing else. That is a perfectly respectable hour's work and it puts you in the game.
Evening two. Pull your evidence together. Review screenshots, CPD certificates, membership confirmations, response time data, your best case study of the year. Do not write yet. Just gather.
Evening three. Write, using everything you have collected, filling every field. Then leave it overnight, read it once more in the morning, and submit.
Here is the thing I would add for RPSA members in particular. Almost everything on that evidence list is material you should be able to produce anyway. Your CPD record, your complaints and client care evidence, your quality assurance arrangements, your defensible file. An awards entry is simply that same body of evidence, arranged to be persuasive rather than defensive. If assembling it turns out to be harder than you expected, that is useful information about your practice quite separately from whether you win anything.
Still on the fence? Let us do the honest arithmetic
I know awards are not everyone's cup of tea. Our profession is full of modest, head down, get on with the job people, and there is a great deal to admire in that. But humour me and weigh it up properly.
Entry is completely free. There are no charges of any kind, no catch, no upsell. Only the judges see your submission, so there is no public list of also rans and no league table of failures. If you enter and it does not come off, you have lost precisely nothing, and nobody will ever know.
If it does come off, you have national recognition. Local press coverage. A headline. A marketing asset you will still be using in five years. You would be able to say, with complete honesty, that you are officially among the best surveying practices in the country. You might even feel justified in adjusting your fees, because people have always paid more for proven quality. You would not go looking for the budget architect of the year, would you?
Downside, nothing. Upside, potentially career changing. I know which side of that bet I would take.
A little friendly rivalry would not go amiss
I would love to see some good natured competition break out among the better known names in our profession this year. Who gets shortlisted? Who takes the Gold? Who wears the dinner jacket best? If our YouTubers, TikTokkers and LinkedIn regulars fancy turning this into a proper contest, I am entirely in favour. Let us make some noise about it.
How to enter, step by step
- Go to the entry page at thenegotiator.co.uk/awards and read the "How to Enter" guidance first. This genuinely is essential reading.
- Register online to create your account. You will receive a confirmation email with an activation link, so check your spam folder if it does not appear.
- Choose your category. You may enter as many categories as you qualify for.
- Work through the criteria fields, using all 500 words in each.
- Upload your supporting evidence against each field.
- Save as you go, and submit before midnight on 6 September 2026.
One further point worth knowing before you start. If you are shortlisted, you are expected to attend the ceremony, and there are no complimentary tickets. Factor that in now rather than being surprised by it later.
The night itself
The finalists and winners will be revealed at the black tie gala dinner at Grosvenor House, Park Lane, London, on Friday 27 November 2026.
Last year's most moving moment came when Kate Faulkner OBE received the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award to a standing ovation, and became the RPSA's first ever Honorary Lifetime Member. A more deserving recipient you could not wish to find. I would very much like to see more surveyors in that room this year, on that shortlist, and up on that stage, RPSA members and non members alike. The RPSA would be glad to fill a few tables and cheer on every surveyor who makes the cut.
Do not leave it to someone else
Twelve months ago we helped put surveying on the national stage for the first time, and the profession did itself proud. The standard across those shortlists was extraordinary, and every one of those entries came from an ordinary practice run by people like you who simply decided to put themselves forward.
You have just under three weeks, and no further extension is coming. Set up your account today, even if you write nothing else until the weekend.
Be bold. The next good story about excellence in surveying could very easily be yours.
Enter at thenegotiator.co.uk/awards. Entries close at midnight on 6 September 2026.
Here is a video summary (Yes, it's a little cheesy, but we don't have a Hollywood budget) - We will learn to dub - honest!
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