It could all have been so different. While waiting for his A-level results, Jeremy Lyons, chief executive of chartered surveyor Ashdown Lyons, wondered whether he would end up going to university to read economics or geography. Then a chance conversation with a family friend led him to embark on a week’s work experience with a firm of surveyors, and caused him to think seriously about his future career. But despite making an almost instant decision to take a degree that related to surveying, he found it was too late to get a place for the autumn term. Undeterred he refused to reconsider his former plans, preferring instead to go back to college to sit more A-levels and wait for another year to go to Reading University to take a degree in estate management – at that time one of only two such courses in the country.
But while there are now many more university courses available, if anything surveying is actually harder to get into than ever. Lyons took an unusual route straight from university into the District Valuer’s office at the Inland Revenue where he conducted valuations for tax and rating purposes. He ended up valuing everything from stud farms to mushroom farms and petrol stations, as well as the full range of residential property. As soon as he qualified, he left and joined a private practice firm in Croydon. Private firms need to take on a surveyor for at least three years before they can earn any real fees from them, as they are still working towards their professional qualification, so the annual intake is very low. Aside from the cost issue of employing someone who cannot really contribute to the business, most surveying firms also accept that their chances of retaining a recently qualified surveyor are minimal. Part of the problem is that to make it in the world of chartered surveying you need to obtain as much practical experience as possible in the years following qualification. Therefore, there is currently a vast shortage of surveyors in the market.
Major problem
Lamenting this, Lyons says: “There are very few opportunities now for new surveyors to take the route I took into the market. Departments have been slimmed down so much the opportunities are not there.
“It is a catch 22 situation, and it is a major problem for the industry. The average age of our surveyors now is probably about 50, and I think that is true in most firms of surveyors.”
Ashdown Lyons was established 15 years ago this month, and started out with Lyons and his friend Peter Ashdown working out of one room, with a secretary in another. Launching in the middle of a recession was never going to be easy, but working off the premise that the previous recession had lasted three years, they thought it would only be around six months until the UK moved back onto a positive financial footing. Perhaps ruing the day he decided not to read economics after all, it was nearer six years before the country moved out of recession. But now, with 65 surveyors working out of fifteen full offices and a number of satellite offices in the South it all seems a long way from his spacious office in Wimbledon Village, set back from a road studded with expensive properties, designer boutiques and top-of-the-range estate agents.
However, Lyons acknowledges he learnt a lot during those early years, and this is partly why he has chosen to remain a regional player rather than expanding all over the UK.
“We have an office in Bristol and a satellite office in Cardiff, but we made a conscious decision not to chase up the country. We have learnt from the mistakes of other private companies in the last recession when there was a similar boom market and some firms moved key personnel from the key markets of the South-East into the North and Midlands and left a fairly fragile infrastructure. We are a strong regional player and some of the main lenders are prepared to use us as well as three or four national surveyors, so we do not need to be UK-wide,” he says.
A lot of surveyors expanded in the late 1990s with the last property boom, but now the market has become a little harder, it is important for them to diversify. Consequently, Lyons recently split the business up into three divisions – building surveying, commercial, and panel management. He admits this is an expensive way to work, but hopes it will leave him in a strong position because a lot of his competitors have let their buildings surveyors go to concentrate on the mortgage valuation. The idea behind panel management is about controlling distribution. The main reason behind it is to get control over distribution from one client. Ideally this is from a lender, but a lot of those on Ashdown Lyons’ panel are packagers. The company currently panel manages for 20 companies and estimates that 60% to 70% of its business now comes in this way rather than direct.
“What we want is to be able to ensure that we can do all the work in our area, and then we can pass work on to other surveyors to do work in other areas. So in some ways our competitors are also our clients, which seems bizarre, but it should work both ways,” he says.
Aside from the housing market, the main issue of concern for surveyors at the moment is that they have no control over fees paid by lenders. Competition has caused them to fall but Lyons says there is a finite level to how low they can go before they are so low they are not viable for the amount of work surveyors need to do. Here Lyons is taking a proactive stance, and is trying to work with some of the bigger groups of surveyors to discuss a resolution to the downward spiral. He says: “The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors is not a very strong voice for residential surveying, and I am talking to a number of firms I want to work quite closely with to see where that takes us, because we need to sit down and agree a sensible strategy between us. We need to break down the barriers of competition.”
As competition forces fees down it will get harder to demand better quality from surveyors in the field. This is also going to be a huge issue with Home Information Packs (HIP) next year, and this is why the possibility that gas engineers and similar people who will do an NVQ and become a home inspector producing HIPs is another concern for surveyors.
“This is a really dangerous route to take, especially from a professional indemnity perspective. There are surveys out there where you can literally fill in a form and tick boxes, so theoretically you could send an unqualified surveyor out who could do a multiple choice survey, come back, give it to a secretary to type up and produce a home survey report. But in doing that they have not had to think what is that wall holding up, or which way are the joints going, and this is a serious problem, but with a lack of home inspectors someone is going to have to do the job.”
The question of whether good surveyors are born or made is still a moot point, but with falling prices and increased competition, the issue of making good surveyors is something that needs to addressed quickly or else we could all end up dealing with the gas man for a lot more than just the utilities.
