Surveyors UK Founder and Director Nina Young Sits Down with Craig MacDonald to Talk About His New Book.

Nina: Hi Craig, good morning! How’s it going?

Craig MacDonald: Morning! Yeah, I’m good, thanks. What time is it there?

Nina: 10 a.m. And for you?

Craig: 8 p.m. which is late for me—I usually go to bed early. It’s really hot in Queensland at this time of year, so most people do things like walking the dog before it gets too hot—usually around half four or five o’clock.

Nina: Wow, that’s early! Is it still dark then?

Craig: A little, but it’s fine. It’s better than being out in the heat later in the day. Last week was rough. I walked out of the office one day, and it felt like stepping into a wall of heat.

Nina: So, tell me about your book.

Craig: I’ve written for a long time, both personally and professionally. The editor of RICS Built Environment Journal asked me a couple of years ago if I had anything, and I sent him some ideas. There is a copyright agreed by contributors however so it was around then that I thought I’ll write for myself for a while.

At the time, my role had been made redundant and was revisiting all my old university notes and books. I wondered what it would be like to go back 15–20 years and see how much had changed. Eventually, I started organising everything in a way that made sense to me, and that became the foundation of the book, not that I realised it at that point.

I did an experiment in early 2023—I was reading about sleep hacking and decided to test it out. I programmed a portable light to turn on gently at 3 a.m. to wake me up, and I’d research and write for three hours, four times a week. I did that for four or five months.

Nina: That’s intense!

Craig: It was. I wrote maybe around 80% of the book that way. Right up to around when I devised this idea to codify the problem-solving process as ODEC (Observations, Deductions, Elimination, Conclusion). I thought that was a nice little hook. ODEC is basically an oversimplification of the scientific method, but it was such an accessible way to approach the case studies. I knew then it was a book and I assigned myself the overwhelming task of seeing it through to the end.

Up to that point though I was truncating my sleep—I function best on about seven and a half hours, and I was only getting five. After four months, my wife pointed it out I had become short-tempered, and I was probably slipping into mild depression. So I stopped doing that and started sleeping properly again.

Nina: When will it be published?

Craig: It’ll be available on Amazon globally as paperback and eBook on 1 April 2025. It’s going through its final proofread right now, which is terrifying because I’ll open it at a random page and find something. Did you know when someone buys a paperback on Amazon, it’s printed on demand—there’s no big warehouse full of books.

Nina: I didn’t know that!

Craig: Yeah, Australia didn’t even have print-on-demand locally until a couple of years ago.

Nina: So, did you always plan to self-publish?

Craig: At first I had no understanding of what the right thing to do was. I didn’t know anything about the publishing world but I went ahead and I submitted proposals to publishers—Wiley, Routledge, and a few others. I wasn’t expecting anything because fewer than 1% of submitted books get picked up. But then I woke up one morning to an email from the publisher of built environment division at Wiley, saying he’d read my proposal and wanted to meet. We spoke for an hour and a half. He was very encouraging and explained how traditional publishing works.

They effectively do everything—cover design, typesetting, editing, supply chain. It’s a well-oiled machine. The challenge is that they market books very specifically, and if your book doesn’t fit neatly onto a particular shelf in a bookshop, i.e., the shelf and audience their marketing machine is pointed at, it’s a hard sell for them. In the end, they passed, and I pivoted to self-publishing.

There was an element of credibility that attracted me to traditional publishing, because anybody can self-publish. So, it can be a bit like, well, is the reader going to really trust this thing? That’s why I hope it’s obvious that I put a lot of care and attention into it. For example. the bibliography took a very long time! Being an RICS member that level of care and transparency was really important to me. For a reader to be able to scrutinise the underlying references. I’m really happy with all of that. Other than the semi-autobiographical elements littered throughout the book, the content draws from already publicly available information. In some ways all I’ve done really is research those topics enough to fashion them into accessible stories.

Nina: Who’s your target audience?

Craig: Good question. I wish I had a simple answer that wasn’t “everyone”! I mentioned how finding the right shelf for it in the bookshop was hard; it seems to have found it’s home on business or social sciences shelves. Maybe real estate, consulting and investing sub categories. It’s tough though because there’s no neat category for it. This isn’t a textbook, it’s something called narrative non-fiction. If you’ve ever read Freakonomics, that’s the closest comparison I can think of. That book made the tools of economics accessible through storytelling. My book does the same for the built environment—mixing stories, problem-solving, and real-world case studies.

Nina: That sounds really interesting.

Craig: A lot of people have been surprised by how much storytelling is in it. That’s why the subtitle changed—it was originally Uncover Mysteries and Solve Them Like a Sleuth, but after feedback, it became A Journey into the Hidden Stories of Property, People, and Problem Solving. It’s just as much about the human side to property, not just technical failures. I like understanding story, story structure, and Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey framework. It’s a framework we can apply to so many things, including with our clients. I’m a big movie buff so the Campbellian stuff has made its way into this. I really hope people at least someone entertained by it. If nothing else, it’ll be there for my boys to read when they’re adults, which was honestly the majority of what kept me going with it.

Nina: Do you think it’ll stand that test of time?

Craig: You have lot’s of good questions! Some of it will, but some of it won’t. You see, the book is split into three parts: Part one lays the foundation for parts two and three. Part one is all about setting the vibe with the reader, who I am, how I will use problem solving tools together with storytelling for big parts of the book. Part two then presents case studies, where chapters are defined by a building material or problem, like “concrete”, “water”, or “movement”. The final part explores additional knowledge areas for today’s building consultant, which focuses on a selection of modern challenges that lie before the profession, including AI. So, to answer your question, if part two is grounded in timeless skills of critical thinking and problem solving, the heart of part three is about having an awareness of the challenges of the present and future. Given how quickly the world is changing around us, I expect part three to age nice and poorly!

The Building Detective: A Journey Into the Hidden Stories of Property, People, and Problem Solving was released on 1 April 2025 and available on Amazon now.

Craig MacDonald FRICS is a Chartered Building Surveyor and of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. He has been active in property and construction for over 20 years. Holding an honours degree in Building Surveying from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, MacDonald is known by his peers for bridging traditional building pathology thinking to modern technology themes.

He has researched and contributed various articles to RICS Built Environment Journal. He co-founded Beyond Condition – a platform which streamlines custom data entry for building inspectors – with his business partner and computer scientist, Ben Ihle. MacDonald is currently practising as a building consultant based in Brisbane, Australia, applying his expertise in commercial property technical due diligence to the Australian and New Zealand property market.

You can get a copy of the now published book here! https://amzn.to/3ERZ5ze