Development Surveyor

East Midlands Freeport is one of eight Government-designated Freeports in England. It operates as a public-private partnership body — the delivery and governance arm responsible for unlocking three major regeneration and investment sites across the East Midlands:

East Midlands Airport / SEGRO Logistics Park - a nationally significant air freight and logistics hub
Ratcliffe-on-Soar - the former power station site, now being transformed into a clean energy and advanced manufacturing destination
Nottingham (Clifton Campus) - Urban Regeneration with an innovation and technology focus

EMF's role is not passive. It holds Government funding, steers delivery against agreed programme milestones, and operates at the interface between Whitehall policy and ground-level site activity. The team is lean, professional, and carries significant public accountability.

The Appointment

Development Surveyor
Permanent, Full Time | Hybrid (Clifton Campus, Nottingham)
£62,000 – £72,000 per annum
This is a senior specialist appointment within the Planning and Development function of EMF's Commercial Team. The role reports to the Head of Planning and Development.
It has been created to bring dedicated, high-calibre development surveying expertise into the organisation advising across the full project lifecycle, from early-stage strategy through acquisition, planning, delivery and disposal.
This is a client-side role. The postholder will not carry internal line management responsibility but will be the professional lead in instructing, coordinating and managing external consultants appointed to support development and commercial activity across the portfolio.

What the Role Involves
The work falls into four substantive areas:
Development and commercial advice. Providing senior professional input across the full development lifecycle appraisals, residual valuations, cash flows, sensitivity analysis, and evidence-based recommendations to support investment and delivery decisions.
Site acquisition and disposal. Leading and advising on land and property transactions across freehold, leasehold, option and conditional structures. Managing external advisers on valuation and transactional activity. Ensuring compliance with EMF governance and value-for-money requirements.
Negotiation of complex agreements. Acting as lead or key advisor on development and partnership agreements including multi-party development agreements, option and promotion agreements, collaboration structures, joint ventures, and overage and clawback mechanisms. Working closely with legal advisers to ensure agreements are commercially robust and deliverable.
Planning, viability and risk. Providing viability advice to support planning, infrastructure funding, grant and loan agreements, and business cases. Identifying and managing development risk across sites. Monitoring performance against approved appraisals.
The role also carries responsibility for direct engagement with local authorities, landowners, developers, investors and public-sector partners and for providing professional input into senior officer, Board and decision-making forums.

The Person
Candidates will be Chartered Surveyors (MRICS or FRICS) with a minimum of five years' post-qualification experience in development work.
Beyond the qualification threshold, what matters is depth of experience in the areas the role demands: site acquisition and disposal, complex agreement negotiation, development appraisal, and the ability to exercise independent commercial judgement in a structured governance environment.
Experience operating within or alongside public-sector bodies, development corporations, regeneration programmes or public-private partnership frameworks is directly relevant and will be weighted accordingly. This is not a purely commercial developer environment. The successful candidate will be comfortable operating within a framework of governance, assurance and public accountability without finding that constraining.

Why This Role
The three sites EMF is delivering are genuinely significant in scale, in complexity, and in their long-term impact on the East Midlands economy. The postholder will have direct influence over commercial outcomes and risk exposure at a senior level, working with a professional team operating at the boundary of public policy and private development.
For a surveyor with the right experience, this is substantive work not advisory noise around the edges of someone else's project.