BCIS at 65: one man’s 55-year career through cost and time

Joe Martin joined BCIS the same year Intel 4004, the world’s first single-chip microprocessor, revolutionised calculators and computing. Both arrivals would go on to make 1971 an important year in the history of built environment cost modelling.

Five decades before his current position as a senior consultant, Joe was a newly trained quantity surveyor with three years’ experience at consultancy Franklin + Andrews and a haircut Robert Plant would have envied.

His locks almost cost him a job – BCIS’s then chief executive was apprehensive about the length of Joe’s feather-cut style and interviewed him no fewer than three times before hiring him.

Clearly, he was the right man for the role.

For 55 of BCIS’s 65 years, Joe has been integral to its progress and success, part of an early team who, much like BCIS’s people today, adapted quickly to a mercurial tech landscape.

In the 1970s, he recalls developing life cycle cost data under the Building Maintenance Cost Information Services and producing guidance on the reinstatement cost of houses alongside the Association for British Insurers.

‘Underinsurance was endemic at that time. It still is. Initially, our aim was to help the public to address the issue. It’s since evolved into a service that supports surveyors to conduct reinstatement cost assessments and enables the wider insurance industry to give better advice and reach better claims outcomes with clients.’

~ Joe Martin, senior consultant, BCIS

Around 1979, in the era of the first Sony Walkman and novel spreadsheet software, VisiCalc, BCIS took the leap from a rudimentary Texas Instruments calculator to securing its first computer – a Northstar Horizon with an 8-bit processor and 48K of RAM.

Joe remembers the new PDP-11/44 that followed, which, if you’re unacquainted, was a high-performance minicomputer that wouldn’t look out of place on the Millenium Falcon.

Combined with the brain power of Joe, BCIS data solutions architect, Ian Pegg, (who himself joined BCIS in 1977) and the wider team, the PDP-11/44 was a floor-standing springboard for moving BCIS online.

It performed background processing on BCIS data and produced lines of text that rolled up the screen in response to user commands.

‘BCIS Online was launched in 1984 as a joint venture with the since defunct Property Service Agency (PSA). Ian and the team were vital in getting this off the ground, ensuring we had a database capable of holding industry data and PSA information in the same place. This was the foundation for establishing our web-based service in 2000.’

~ Joe Martin, senior consultant, BCIS

Working for BCIS in the ‘80s took Joe international. He travelled to East and West Africa to deliver workshops on elemental cost planning and project management as part of a joint effort between BCIS and the Commonwealth Association of Land Economists to promote the principles globally.

Joe’s career is as varied as it is tied to change in construction and politics.

He’s helped to develop industry standards for data classification and life cycle costing, formed indexing methodologies with the government and advised the Cabinet Office and Infrastructure UK on benchmarking.

He’s even sat on judging panels for former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott’s £60,000 housing competition and its net zero carbon housing successor.

His pathway at BCIS traces the first Tender Price Index and the birth of email (1971), the web version of BCIS and introduction of commercial USB flash drives (2000) and modern expansion of the BCIS database and mainstream explosion of AI capability (2022 onwards).

Joe is proudly BCIS’s longest-serving employee. As of January 2026, he is also now one of more than 80 people working to continuously raise the bar for how cost and carbon intelligence are shared, analysed and interpreted.

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