Online architect service for London and the whole UK

Which parts of the job genuinely work online?

More than most people expect. The parts of an architectural appointment that used to require meetings are now better handled asynchronously, because they produce a written record everyone can check.

• Briefing and feasibility — a call, photographs and the address are enough to establish the planning route, the Article 4 position and a fixed fee.
• Design development — drawings issued as PDFs with comments returned by email produce a clearer audit trail than a meeting where three changes are agreed verbally and one is forgotten.
• Submission — the Planning Portal is an online system. There is no in-person element to a planning application anywhere in England.
• Case management — officer queries arrive by email and are answered by email, usually with an amended drawing attached.
• Building control — Full Plans submissions and plan check correspondence are handled electronically by every London borough and every registered approver.
• Document storage — your drawings, application reference, correspondence and decision notice live in one portal you can hand to a solicitor a decade later.

Why can the survey never be done online?

Because a planning drawing is evidence about a real building, and the council check it against their own aerial photography, street imagery and planning history for the address. Several online services ask the client to measure their own property or work from an estate agent’s floorplan. Estate agent floorplans are marketing documents drawn to approximate dimensions with no wall thicknesses, no levels and no external heights — every one of which a planning or building control drawing depends on.

The consequences of a survey-free set are predictable. Existing elevations that do not match the building undermine the credibility of the whole submission. A permission granted on inaccurate plans is vulnerable, because the approved plans condition describes something that cannot be built. And at construction stage the builder finds the discrepancy, prices a variation, and the saving disappears several times over.

Our surveyors attend within three to seven working days of instruction anywhere inside the M25, and by arrangement across the wider commuter belt. The survey takes two to three hours on a typical terrace and records external dimensions and levels, internal room sizes, wall thicknesses, floor-to-ceiling heights on every storey, ridge and eaves heights, roof pitch and the boundary positions the block plan needs.

How does an online service compare with a high-street practice?

The genuinely cheap online services are cheap because they exclude the survey and the case management — the two things that determine whether the application succeeds. The genuinely expensive high-street route is expensive because it prices a percentage of a build cost. The position we occupy is a fixed fee for the full scope, roughly 30% below typical London architect rates, with the survey and the eight weeks of council correspondence inside the number.

What should you check before buying an online service?

The category is unregulated, and the price spread between providers is explained almost entirely by scope rather than by quality. Six questions separate a genuine remote practice from a drawing-production website.

• Who surveys the property, and is it in the price? If the answer is that you measure it yourself, the drawings are only as good as your tape measure and the council will compare them to their own imagery.
• Is the practice chartered, and by whom? Ask for an ARB registration number or a CIAT membership number, not a logo on a homepage.
• What is the professional indemnity limit? £1m is the practical floor for domestic work; we carry £2m. It is what responds if a drawing error reaches site.
• Who answers the case officer? Establish whether the eight weeks after submission are included or billed. This is where fixed fees quietly stop being fixed.
• How many revision rounds are included? A defined number in writing, not an implication.
• Do you receive editable CAD? PDF-only delivery locks you into the same provider for the building regulations stage.

One further check is worth thirty seconds: ask for two recent decision notices in your own borough. Planning is administered locally, and a provider working nationally from a template will not know that your council withdrew permitted development rights along your street, or that its local validation list demands a document the national list does not.

How does a remote project actually run?

• Day 0 — you send the address, photographs and a description of what you want. We check Article 4, conservation area and listing status and return a fixed fee.
• Day 3–7 — measured survey on site. You do not need to take a day off; access arrangements are agreed in advance.
• Day 7–14 — existing and proposed drawings issued to your portal for comment.
• Day 14–20 — revisions closed and the application submitted through the Planning Portal in your name, with the reference sent to you.
• Week 8–10 — decision. Officer queries and amended drawings are handled throughout at no extra charge.

Everything is visible in the client portal: drawings, revisions, the application reference, the correspondence and the decision notice. You keep the full package as PDFs and editable CAD files whichever way the decision goes.

Where the project proceeds to construction, the building regulations set is produced from the same survey and the same model, so nothing is redrawn and no dimension is re-established. That continuity is the reason the Complete package at £1,750 costs less than commissioning the planning and building control stages separately, and it is also why a remote appointment is no disadvantage: the model, not the meeting, is what carries information between stages.

Questions about working with an online architect