Names behind the numbers: Cos Kamasho

When BCIS principal consultant Cos Kamasho first joined the company in the mid-1990s, producing built environment cost intelligence involved far more putting pen to paper than it does today.

Over the past three decades, Cos has played an integral role in developing and digitising these processes, helping to transform how BCIS data are produced and accessed. The attention to detail and effort required to carry out such complex work manually is difficult to imagine today.

‘When I joined BCIS, my main role involved working through the substantial volume of cost data being shared with the business. At the time, we published our cost analyses in hard copy so as well as carrying out the analysis, I prepared the physical copies sent to clients.’

~ Cos Kamasho, principal consultant, BCIS

Before BCIS, Cos worked as a civil engineering technician in Zimbabwe for five years during the early 1980s. Core responsibilities included engineering surveying, site measurements, structural concrete detailing and preparing steel bending and materials schedules. His keen interest in the numbers side of the work led him down the quantity surveying path, first to Edinburgh in the late 1980s where he earned a degree in the discipline.

During his studies, he worked as a trainee surveyor for multidisciplinary firm Williams, MacDonald and Hastings. He fondly recalls spending many weekends climbing into strangers’ attics, measuring moisture levels in roof timbers as part of research for the Building Research Establishment.

In 1989, he moved to London, briefly joining The Surveyors Collaborative in Kingston upon Thames as an assistant quantity surveyor, working on BCIS data among other projects.

But his career did not follow a straight line. In 1991, Cos left London for Zimbabwe, where he spent two years as the deputy chief quantity surveyor with the Ministry of Transport, concentrating on World Bank-funded projects with a particular focus on national highways.

During this time, he implemented a roadworks cost benchmarking system, overseeing the collection and analysis of data from Zimbabwe’s then-eight provinces to establish reliable benchmarks for road construction costs per kilometre. He also worked as a part-time land economics lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe and Harare Polytechnic.

Another change of direction brought him back to London where he completed a master’s degree in construction management before joining BCIS permanently in 1995.

‘Back then, BCIS was almost run like a small family business. We would go for five-a-side football on Fridays and knew each other’s families. I even remember Joe Martin [BCIS senior consultant] used to play guitar in a band and would invite us to his jam sessions.’

Alongside analysing the substantial volume of data received for BCIS Average Prices and contributing to BCIS tender price indices, Cos became technical editor of the BCIS Guide to House Rebuilding Costs, responsible for maintaining and developing the company’s rebuild cost models. This too was a labour-intensive process, with updated models collated by hand and hard-copy publications prepared for clients.

His work naturally led him to co-develop the BCIS Guide to Rebuilding Costs of Flats, launched in January 2000. BCIS had already spent several years developing rebuild cost models for houses, but Cos and the wider team recognised growing demand for more comprehensive residential coverage. Over the years, he has expanded the guidance to cover pre-war dwellings, alongside an extensive range of ancillary models and additional adjusters.

As technology advanced, Cos also played an important role in transforming BCIS’s wealth of manually maintained data into digital resources. In 2022, he oversaw the complete remeasurement, digitisation and consolidation of all rebuild models into the BCIS database.

‘When I first joined, we were calculating tender price indices by hand. Computers were still coming into their own, but I remember sorting our first spreadsheet for tender price index calculations. In the 2000s, we developed our first online rebuild cost calculator. For a while, we continued providing surveyors with printed documents to help ease the transition to digital tools too.’

Cos’s career with BCIS has also taken him across Europe and beyond. In the late 2010s, he worked with Eurostat as a technical lead on construction price surveys, developing bills of quantities and analysing survey data to calculate construction price level indices and purchasing power parities (PPPs) across 37 participating European countries. This work also led to his involvement in the validation and benchmarking exercise for the African Development Bank’s 2018 PPP survey.

Cos jokes that it would be easier to remember the European countries he didn’t visit, although trips to Luxembourg, Greece, Germany and France particularly stand out.

His contributions extend well beyond these major projects. From developing a dilapidations database and bespoke inflation indices for public and private sector clients, to co-authoring the 2008 and 2012 editions of the BCIS Standard Form of Cost Analysis, Cos has both witnessed and helped drive the evolution of how BCIS data are collected, analysed and delivered.

He continues to play an integral role in maintaining the breadth, reliability and relevance of the company’s cost intelligence. His career reflects not only how far BCIS has evolved, but also the expertise and dedication behind that progress.

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