Project Advisory for Universities

Project advisory that helps universities deliver works with stronger control across occupied campus buildings

We provide project advisory and contract administration services for universities across London, supporting estates teams, capital projects managers and procurement leads through the planning, procurement and delivery of refurbishment, remedial and capital works across campus buildings.

University projects present particular challenges. Buildings are often occupied during works, programmes are shaped by academic calendars, procurement governance is demanding, and the range of stakeholders involved can be wide. Our advisory approach is designed to help university clients maintain stronger control through each stage of delivery.

London university estates concentrate exactly the constraints that make projects hard to control: listed and period buildings alongside dense modern campuses, works that must fit around teaching terms and examinations, live research and residential occupation, and procurement governance that has to withstand audit. We act client-side from brief and feasibility through procurement and contract administration to handover, defining scope, programme and budget clearly and holding the works to them. That means sequencing around the academic calendar, coordinating the design team and specialists, managing variations and change transparently, and reporting progress and risk in a form estates and capital-projects teams can take to their committees. Acting only for the university keeps decisions, certification and change control independent of the contractor, so refurbishment, remedial and capital works are delivered to cost, quality and programme.

A university estate is managed under pressures a commercial portfolio does not share. English higher education providers are regulated by the Office for Students, whose registration conditions include the effective management of resources and ongoing financial sustainability — and for an institution whose estate is one of its largest assets and largest costs, that makes estate condition a governance question, not just a maintenance one. Universities are autonomous bodies that fund their own buildings, so investment in the estate competes directly with teaching, research and the student experience for the same finite capital.

The defining challenge across the sector is the maintenance backlog — the accumulated cost of deferred repair and replacement across an estate that typically mixes listed and Victorian buildings, mid-century teaching blocks, specialist laboratories and modern residences, each ageing on its own curve. Sound, current condition data is what lets an estates team quantify that backlog, separate the genuinely urgent from the merely aged, and defend a capital bid with evidence rather than assertion. Without it, spending tends to follow whatever failed most recently, which is the most expensive way to run an estate.

Our role is to give that decision-making a reliable evidence base. Condition surveys across a campus, scored consistently and structured into a lifecycle and cost model, let an institution plan replacements before they become emergencies, phase works around term times and research commitments, and align the estate with its wider strategy — whether that is decarbonisation, space rationalisation or growth. We tailor the depth to the purpose, from a rapid backlog appraisal across the whole estate to detailed surveys of the buildings a capital programme is about to touch.