Please see an interview with Charles Dixon – a RICS surveyor with over 26 years of experience in the industry. Charles provides a few in-depth data of tons relevance to UK assets traders, including a definition of what ‘price’ method these days; present-day valuation techniques; due diligence tips; his very own thoughts at the property marketplace; regulation of the assets enterprise, and plenty extra:
I actually have worked within the asset world, considering graduating from Reading University in 1976 to start with inside the South Midlands and East Anglia, but for the remaining 26 years within the South West, including Cornwall, Devon, Somers, and Dorset.
Here is the nontechnical answer: the United Kingdom property marketplace is a largely open and loose marketplace made of thousands of character transactions made via human beings and firms with wide-ranging goals. A free drift of information within the marketplace is crucial in informing the choices in the back of one’s transactions. The net has revolutionized the provision of statistics on transactions and has made it handy to absolutely everyone, while earlier than handiest human beings within the enterprise had such statistics. This has enabled many greater human beings to sign up for the assets proudly owning community. Value is what one individual can pay to any other for belonging. If the price isn’t to be distorted, each party must be nicely informed and appear in a palms duration relationship.
Surveyors base their assessment of fee now not handiest on similar evidence of similar transactions but also on their evaluation of contemporary market sentiment from the general public, the number of residences to be had and being traded, and of route many external elements that endure at the individual’s assignment a property transaction – for example the general country of the economic system, interest fees, taxation rules, and many others. If surveyors are taking a conservative view, this ought to mirror a conservative technique that events are taking in real negotiations and transactions and reflecting the uncertainty of the marketplace of which they shape component.
Data on asset transactions are available through many loose websites and thru the Land Registry. Statistics on traits are also available unfastened from the Department for Communities and Local Government and indices on house fee move from Halifax Bank and Nationwide Building Society. There are also subscription websites giving additional facts that understand neighborhood markets (which include ‘Hometrack’). Agents are typically inclined to help with facts on transactions in their location, provided they are approached tactfully. They’re now not restrained from giving information on a transaction through confidentiality. The contemporary state of affairs is dramatically better for individual traders than it has ever been. Through the years, it’s far in all likelihood to improve further with the net’s development. However, while there are so few transactions we are currently experiencing, it isn’t easy to locate similar proof. This is a difficulty for expert Valuers as a whole lot as the majority. It needs offers to be accomplished to establish the market. In these conditions, investors may be taking extra dangers as their choices are less well known. Property transactions have never been dangerous loose, and it could be that, after a long length of a rising market earlier than this recession, some people have become too complacent and assumed that their property transactions could not fail.
Terms of business have to be agreed upon with the consumer earlier than traveling the assets. Very regularly, the purchaser is urgent to have the recommendation/ survey/valuation as fast as viable. Workplace-based totally research sometimes happens after a visit in preference to earlier than. In any case, the Surveyor can goal his research more efficiently if he has first visited the assets and actually it and its place. Depending on the reason of the document, the Surveyor will want to don’t forget maximum of the following:
Surveyors have to be very wary of laptop valuations which can be misleading to the recipient if the premise of the valuation is not properly understood. In well-known, such valuations have to be best undertaken while the property has been previously inspected and preferably now not too long earlier than. Such valuations ought to definitively nation the assumptions on which they’re made. They are satisfactorily avoided whilst a surveyor is coping with the majority who will probably anticipate the equal stage of know-how of the belongings as if it had truly been inspected and might feel let down if they, in the end, find modified situations which had no longer been diagnosed via the shortage of an inspection.
In my opinion, residential residence charges are too high for income ranges – mainly if we want to encourage a homeownership way of life as a society. This is not a fault of the belongings marketplace, however, of outside elements that bear on home shoppers and a lack of recent houses available to shop for as a consequence of limiting delivery. In an open marketplace, together with the property market inside the UK, domestic customers are competing for the available houses to buy with different styles of purchasers consisting of overseas investors, purchase to permit buyers, holiday home consumers, and so forth. Unless the authorities intervene to downside those other varieties of consumers (which I would not advocate), the key to reducing fees is to grow the delivery of homes on the market.