A building contract only protects you if someone administers it properly. The contract administrator issues the instructions, certifies payments, values variations and decides completion — impartially, under the contract’s own rules. Manchester Surveyors provides RICS chartered surveyor contract administration for JCT and other standard-form contracts.
What the Contract Administrator Does
- Contract preparation — selecting the right form (JCT Minor Works, Intermediate, Homeowner contracts), completing it correctly and tying drawings and specification into it
- Instructions and variations — formal instruction of changes, valued fairly, so scope creep never becomes a dispute
- Interim valuations and payment certificates — you pay for work actually done, protecting cashflow on both sides
- Progress and extension-of-time decisions — impartial assessment of delay claims under the contract machinery
- Practical completion, defects liability and final account — snagging, retention release and the certificate that closes the project cleanly. Our snagging expertise earns its keep here
Why It Matters
Most residential and small commercial disputes we see as construction expert witnesses share one root cause: no contract administration. Payments ran ahead of work, changes were agreed verbally, and completion was never defined. Professional administration costs a small percentage of the build — and routinely saves multiples of it.
Who We Act For
Homeowners on extensions and refurbishments, landlords and management companies on major works, and commercial clients on fit-outs — across Manchester, London, Birmingham and the UK, often alongside our project management service.
About to sign a building contract? Speak to us first — the contract administrator is appointed before the contract is signed, not after the problems start.
What a Contract Administrator Actually Does
Once a building contract is signed, someone has to operate it impartially: issuing instructions, valuing work done, certifying payments, assessing claims for extra time or money, and certifying practical completion and the final account. That is contract administration. Done well, it keeps both employer and contractor honest and the project out of dispute; done badly — or not at all — it is where most small-works projects go wrong.
How We Work
We administer JCT contracts — Minor Works, Intermediate and Standard forms — for domestic and commercial clients across the North West. The service includes pre-contract advice on the right form, valuations and payment certificates on a regular cycle, site inspections tied to those valuations, management of variations with cost implications recorded as they arise, and a properly certified completion with retention handled correctly. Where defects or disagreements emerge we deal with them within the contract machinery — and if matters escalate, our construction expert witness team is behind us.
When is contract administration worth it?
As a rule of thumb: any project where you are paying a contractor in stages against progress. The fee is a small percentage of the build cost and routinely pays for itself in a single properly-valued payment cycle. Call 020 4579 8270 for a fixed proposal.