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RICS professional guidance

Status: Live since v0.11.26 — RICS pack v1 complete (Plan 96, all work-items WI-0 through WI-8 shipped).

Scope

The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors regulates surveying practice in the UK and 140-plus other countries. The Secruna RICS pack covers the AI uses RICS members commonly deploy: automated valuation models, GIS-AI workflows, generative AI report drafting, due-diligence document extraction, and client-facing chatbots.

The customer is a chartered surveying firm — chartered status, RICS member regulator, audit cycles every two to five years depending on firm size. The compliance surface is professional-conduct based rather than statutory: failure to disclose AI use to a client is a RICS Standards and Ethics matter.

What's in the pack

Five rules in rule_book/v1/rics/:

  1. AVM (Automated Valuation Model) — flag use of AVMs in valuation reports and require methodology disclosure.
  2. GIS-AI — flag AI use in GIS workflows (e.g. boundary detection, land-use classification) where outputs feed regulated advice.
  3. Generative AI report drafting — flag where an LLM has drafted any portion of a client-facing report; require human sign-off and disclosure.
  4. Due-diligence document extraction — flag AI-extracted facts from due-diligence documents that drive surveyor advice.
  5. Client chatbot — flag any client-facing chatbot for explicit disclosure that the responder is AI.

Eval F1 = 1.000 across all five rules on the Plan 96 WI-8 golden set (20 cases).

Customer-facing surface

  • AI Use Disclosure Statement (Plan 96 WI-5) — per-AI-system exportable disclosure that satisfies the RICS professional duty to inform clients of AI use.
  • Firm AI Register (Plan 96 WI-6) — tenant-wide register exportable as PDF or CSV, for the firm's RICS audit submission.
  • /use-cases/rics marketing landing page (Plan 96 WI-7).

Plan references

  • Plan 96 WI-0 through WI-8 (all shipped):
    • WI-0 Loader multi-framework + AVM rule (POC).
    • WI-1 4 remaining RICS rules (GIS, GenAI drafting, due-diligence, chatbot).
    • WI-2 Multi-framework load + per-tenant enabled_frameworks.
    • WI-3 Per-framework category taxonomy (EU + RICS enums).
    • WI-4 Surveying connector signal patterns.
    • WI-5 AI Use Disclosure Statement export.
    • WI-6 Firm AI Register (PDF + CSV).
    • WI-7 Marketing landing /use-cases/rics + GTM positioning.
    • WI-8 Eval golden set — 20 cases, per-rule F1, cross-framework guard.

What's next

The RICS pack is feature-complete for v1. Future work tracks RICS guidance updates rather than adding new rules — the current five cover the AI uses RICS members actually deploy. Plan 102 (RLB customer pilot) will surface gaps from real audit submissions.

Analysis

Scope

The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors regulates approximately 134,000 chartered surveying professionals across the UK and 140-plus countries. The September 2025 Responsible Use of AI professional guidance is binding on RICS-regulated firms and individual chartered members. It applies to any AI use that touches regulated surveying advice: valuation, building surveying, quantity surveying, project management, and land and property due diligence. Geographic reach: any work undertaken under chartered status, even outside the UK. The pack is in scope for: AVMs in valuation reports, GIS-AI workflows feeding regulated advice, generative AI in client-facing report drafting, AI-extracted facts in due-diligence documents, and client-facing chatbots. Out of scope: internal back-office AI (HR, payroll, document classification not feeding regulated advice); AI used purely for research; and non-RICS-regulated property tech firms whose advice is not given under chartered status.

Key obligations

  1. Disclosure — surveyors must disclose AI use to clients before the AI-influenced output is relied upon, in a form the client can understand and challenge.
  2. Competence — the surveyor remains professionally responsible for the output; AI does not transfer liability or competence requirements.
  3. Methodology documentation — for AVMs and GIS-AI specifically, the methodology, training-data origin, and known limits must be recorded and available on request.
  4. Human oversight — generative AI drafted content in client-facing reports requires an explicit human sign-off step the surveyor can defend at audit.
  5. Audit trail — the firm must keep a register of AI uses sufficient for the RICS quality-assurance audit cycle (every two to five years depending on firm size).
  6. Client chatbot transparency — any client-facing AI conversational agent must identify itself as AI on first substantive interaction.

Our coverage approach

The five rules in the pack map one-to-one onto the obligations. Disclosure is satisfied by the AI Use Disclosure Statement export (Plan 96 WI-5) — per-AI-system PDF the surveyor attaches to the client engagement. The methodology obligation maps to the AVM and GIS-AI rules' verdict copy, which prompts the firm to fill in training-data origin and known-limits fields surfaced in the inventory item. Human oversight on generative AI drafting is enforced through the dashboard HITL queue: any inventory item flagged as genai_report_drafting routes to a reviewer. The audit trail is the Firm AI Register export (Plan 96 WI-6) — the tenant-wide inventory in PDF and CSV, ready for RICS quality-assurance submission. Client chatbot disclosure is a rule verdict that points to the marketing-site or product surface where the disclosure must appear; we flag presence-of-AI without an identifying phrase as a fail. Eval golden set scores F1 = 1.000 across all five rules.

Gaps

The RICS Red Book valuation methodology rules (the procedural detail of how to perform a valuation) are not part of the pack — those are professional-conduct standards Secruna does not seek to encode; we only flag where AI is in the methodology and require the surveyor to document compliance themselves. Quantity surveying specific AI uses (BIM-derived cost estimation, AI-driven take-offs) have rule scaffolding but the matcher coverage is prioritised at AVM and GIS first; quantity-surveying-specific matchers ship in v1.1. Cross-jurisdiction RICS guidance — chartered surveyors outside the UK fall under local RICS chapters that may add country-specific obligations; the v1 pack treats RICS as one regulator and does not yet branch on chapter. Counsel review of the disclosure-statement template wording is pending Plan 97 and a UK property-law counsel relationship; the current template carries a [reviewed by counsel: pending] watermark.

Customer impact

RICS regulation is professional-conduct based, not statutory. The penalty bracket is therefore reputational and commercial rather than financial: a finding against a chartered firm at the quality-assurance cycle can result in monitored status, fee income restrictions, or in serious cases withdrawal of chartered status for individual surveyors. For the firm, loss of chartered status removes the ability to sign Red Book valuations, which is most surveying firms' core revenue. RICS enforcement is slower than EU AI Act fines but the commercial consequence is existential for the firm whose chartered status is at stake. Beyond direct enforcement, mortgage lenders and large institutional clients increasingly include "AI use disclosure" clauses in panel appointments — failure to evidence disclosure is a soft commercial gate that surfaces well before any RICS investigation.