Can a Consumer Verify You in Two Minutes?

Why this question matters more than you think and what surveyors need to do about it.

In the course of my work - and my curiosity - I find myself making the same enquiries over and over. Simple searches anyone can do online. And they all start with the same question: is this surveyor legit?

Every time, I find myself wondering why, if a consumer is going to put their trust and their money into a professional service, it is so difficult to verify someone who claims to be qualified.

A few things come to mind. Ever the cynic - which, let's be honest, makes us good at our jobs - there might be a deliberate discrepancy. More often, though, it is because the surveyor cannot be bothered, does not understand, or has not appreciated the significance of what might feel like admin, but can make or break a relationship of trust with a client. But most frustratingly, our profession talks about consumer trust, a gold standard, and holding someone's hand through the journey - and yet has failed spectacularly to understand what any of that looks like from the consumer's side.

I have spent years raising concerns, writing letters, attending meetings, and making the case at the most senior levels of this profession. You can read posts I have written previously written about the difficulty of verifying surveyors via the RICS register: view LinkedIn post, and on disciplinary panel hearings and what they reveal about the regulatory gap: view LinkedIn post

I have done it because I believe it matters - for consumers who deserve protection, and for the surveyors who are doing everything right and deserve to be seen clearly. I am still trying. Some might say I am making a nuisance of myself. But the result is the same: the system is still not where it needs to be, to the detriment of the public we serve and the future of our own profession.

You might think this sounds dramatic, or that it is not affecting your small business. Trust me, it is. And in a world where AI means we can no longer assume we are the trusted source of truth in a property transaction, the stakes have never been higher.

Right now, today, a consumer, a potential client, a journalist, a lender, or an AI tool searching for you may not be able to confirm that you are who you say you are. That gap is not just a problem for consumers. It is a problem for you.

The question that changes everything

Could a complete stranger verify you - or your surveying practice - as a legitimate, qualified, RICS-regulated surveyor in under two minutes, without contacting you? Most surveyors assume the answer is yes. Most have never actually checked.

Consumers do not understand post-nominals, professional bodies, or the difference between individual membership and firm registration. And should they have to? Should someone need extensive education just to understand who they are dealing with before they can even decide whether to trust us? Consumers judge trust by what they can quickly and confidently verify. If the picture they find is incomplete, inconsistent, or confusing, they doubt. And doubt is the last thing you want when someone is already deciding whether to work with you or let you into their home.

The property market is different from other professional services. Transactions are expensive, emotional, and stressful. But it is also about territory - sometimes literally. We work on people's existing and future homes, their most significant financial commitment, often their most emotionally loaded decision. That changes everything you thought you knew about customer experience. It means we need to stop educating and use language that consumers understand.

This is not a marketing problem. It is a professional protection problem.

The system that should help - and where it falls short

The infrastructure to make surveyors verifiable already exists, in part. RICS has registers. It has a Find a Member tool and a Find a Surveyor tool. Those tools, used well, can help consumers check that a surveyor is genuinely qualified and regulated.

But searching those registers is not as straightforward as it should be. You cannot search by membership number or firm number. Many surveyors have similar or identical names - there are multiple surveyors with the same name. Many use different names across different profiles, especially if a middle name is preferred. If someone searches for Mike, Chris, or Steve, they will not find a Michael, Christopher (or Christine), Steven, or Stephen. And when a member is suspended or expelled and removed from the directory, a consumer searching for them in the directory finds nothing - that’s another register search called Published Regulatory Outcomes. 

If someone is not visible in any member search, the consumer has to email RICS and wait for a response. That is not verification. That is a barrier. And each time RICS has to respond to an email, it uses members' fees to cover the cost.

I raised this at last year's RICS AGM. The response acknowledged that RICS operates a principles-based, self-regulatory model that relies on members to act with integrity and proactively ensure compliance. It confirmed that RICS does not routinely verify every corporate record to identify potential non-compliance, and that action is taken only when concerns are identified through other means.

I understand the principles-based approach. But that response raises serious questions about what it means in practice for consumers trying to verify who they are dealing with - and about our collective duties under the Royal Charter to the public we serve.

The result is that there is still no consumer-facing register of regulated firms that is simple, searchable, and designed for someone who knows nothing about surveying. There is no mechanism that takes a consumer from "I want to check this person is legitimate" to "yes, confirmed, they are." The burden falls on the consumer to navigate a system that was never designed with them in mind.

Why your individual credibility is your best protection

In the absence of a system that does this properly, what you control is your own verifiability. This matters for reasons that go beyond reputation management. When regulators, journalists, or courts start asking questions about you, about the profession, about how a consumer came to be harmed, the surveyors who are clearly, consistently, and accurately presented online are in a fundamentally different position than those who are not.

Your RICS membership number, your firm registration, your credentials, your photograph - these are not administrative details. They are the evidence that you are who you say you are. They are the first line of your professional defence.

The surveyors who have those things properly in place - consistent across every platform, accurate in every register, easy to find and easy to verify - are building something worth protecting. And the ones who have not checked lately may have gaps they are completely unaware of. I know this because I run a challenge that asks surveyors to do exactly that check. The number of people who come back, surprised by what they find, tells me everything.

I have also seen what happens when a sole practitioner discovers their identity and business details have been stolen and used by someone else. I have seen consumers who trusted a professional, found themselves let down, and then discovered that the system they turned to for help was not set up to help them either. That is not a hypothetical. It is a pattern.

What AI has changed

There is another layer to this that is moving fast.

Consumers are no longer the only ones searching for you. AI tools are too. When someone types "Is [your name] a qualified RICS surveyor?" into Claude, ChatGPT or Perplexity, the answer that comes back is only as good as the information available across the web. Consistent, verifiable, correctly presented information gets surfaced confidently. Fragmented, inconsistent, or missing information gets ignored - or produces wrong answers.

This is not a future problem, it’s happening now, and it means that the work of making yourself verifiable has never been more urgent - or more straightforward to start.

What you can do

I created the free five-day "Can a Consumer Verify You in Two Minutes?" challenge because of everything I have described above. It is not about becoming an influencer or redesigning your website. It is about spending a week looking at your practice through a consumer's eyes and identifying the obvious gaps that too many of us never get around to fixing.

Over five days, you will check your online visibility, how you display your credentials, your photo and name consistency, every place you appear online, and then run the actual test — asking someone with no knowledge of surveying to verify you using only what is publicly available. You will also check what AI tools say about you.

What you find is your gap list. Some things will be fixed quickly, some will take longer, but now you will know. Because "am I good at my job?" and "can someone verify that I am who I say I am?" are different questions. Both matter. Right now, the second one matters more than ever.

You have more control and power here than you think. Your credibility and your reputation are worth protecting. Do not wait for the system to make it easy.

And if this has prompted wider concerns about the profession and the regulatory gaps I have described, please raise them. With RICS and your other professional bodies. Directly, and on the record. The more voices making the same case, the harder it becomes to ignore.

Take the free five-day challenge and download the Professional Presence Checklist at lovesurveying.com/verification-challenge

If you want to explore what else might need attention in your practice, book a one-to-one Clarity Session with me - details on the website.

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