Please see an interview with Charles Dixon – a RICS surveyor with over 26 years of revel in the industry. Charles presents some in-intensity information of an awful lot of relevance to UK assets investors, such as a definition of the ‘fee’ approach nowadays, contemporary day valuation techniques, due diligence hints, his mind at the belongings market, the law of the belongings industry and much more:
1) Can you explain a chunk of your history?
I have worked in the belongings global because I graduated from Reading University in 1976 in the South Midlands and East Anglia. However, I have worked for 26 years in the South West along with Cornwall, Devon, Somers, and Dorset.
2) What is your definition of ‘price’ inside the present-day UK property marketplace?
Here is the nontechnical answer: the UK belongings market is a largely open and loose marketplace made from heaps of character transactions made using humans and businesses with wide-ranging goals. An unfastened drift of facts in the market is critical in informing the choices on the back of one’s transactions.
The net has revolutionized the supply of statistics on transactions and has made it on hand to all and sundry, whereas before, only humans inside the enterprise had such statistics. This has enabled many greater human beings to join the assets proudly owning network. Value is what one character pays to any other for belonging, and if the fee isn’t distorted, each event ought to be nicely informed and appear in a duration courting.
3) Would it be truthful to mention that most surveyors take a conservative view of property valuation because of the market’s uncertainty?
Surveyors base their assessment of cost no longer simplest on similar proof of comparable transactions; however, additionally, on their evaluation of current marketplace sentiment from the general public, the number of properties to be had and being traded, and the route many outside elements that undergo on the individuals venture a belongings transaction – as an instance: the general kingdom of the financial system, interest costs, taxation regulations and so on. If surveyors take a conservative view, this needs to mirror a traditional technique that parties take in real negotiations and transactions and reflect the uncertainty of the market they form a part of.
4) Most investors studying this are residential assets consumers – one trouble that has emerged due to the low market pastime is the capacity to acquire comparable bought information. What are the nice steps that may be undertaken from your factor of view? Data on asset transactions is available through many loose websites and the Land Registry.
Statistics on traits are also available from the Department for Communities and Local Government, and indices on residence charge actions from Halifax Bank and Nationwide Building Society. There are also subscription websites giving additional facts and understanding about neighborhood markets (which include ‘Hometrack’). Agents are usually inclined to assist with statistics on transactions of their location furnished they’re approached tactfully. They may not be confined from giving records on a trade with the aid of confidentiality. The contemporary scenario is dramatically better for individual traders than ever. Through the years, it has probably enhanced similarly with further net development.
However, while we’re experiencing so few transactions, finding similar evidence is miles tough. This is an issue for expert Valuers as well as the general public. It desires offers to be executed to establish the market. In those conditions, buyers can take greater risks as their decisions are less nicely knowledgeable. Property transactions have by no means been risk unfastened, and it can be that, after an extended length of a growing marketplace before this recession, a few humans became too complacent. They assumed that their asset transactions couldn’t fail.
5) Can you communicate via the procedures you would adopt before traveling to a property in phrases of your due diligence? Terms of commercial enterprise have to be agreed with the customer before journeying the belongings. Very regularly, the customer is pressing to have the advice/ survey/valuation as quickly as possible so that office-based studies once in a while happen after a visit in preference to before. In any case, the Surveyor can target his studies more efficiently if he has first visited the assets and, in fact, its vicinity. Depending on the purpose of the record, the Surveyor will want to recollect the maximum of the following.
