Trade Group excluded from RICS talks

http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/news.ma/ViewArticle?R=83938

Since you ask: good luck Nigel but I suspect you don't need it. Your excellent knowledge and informed views delivered without fanfare with Neil Robertson beside you will surprise your RICS audience who clearly have presided over their TRVG enclave which has not had scrutiny for far too long and whose actions are in danger of bringing the whole RICS Royal Charter into serious disrepute. Consider recent valuations of the two biggest pubco estates actually RISING when all other property values have been plummeting by up to a third and ask RICS when did pigs actually begig to fly?

It is perfectly appropriate that RICS should NOT include the very people who are the cause of the problem in pub valuations to initial, information gathering, meetings. 'Normal' surveyors I have met describe the machinations of public house valuations as 'mumbo jumbo' and 'opaque nonesense'; 'delivered by people who describe themselves as 'specialists and highly trained experts''. PAH!

The magic mystery tour methods of pub valuations that have become cosy tradition - in the tied pub industry particularly - bear no relation to the financial viability of a business to achieve projected profits and much more to the amount of work and fees made available to surveyors who have opted to learn the dark secrets of giving pubcos the valuations they want. Trebles all round.

It is people exactly like Martin Willis, who I was privileged to meet immediately after his risible showing at the BEC hearing last year, who established the completely unsustainable profits method as applied by RICS and whose tenure on TRVG has taken pub rents to the scandalous level they stand at now after a couple of decades of way above inflation rent increases across the industry.

Martin Willis says the panel will report back to TRVG as if TRVG are in charge of what's happening at RICS. Well it's not quite like that Mr Willis. This is your little group's wake up call. TRVG has been rumbled. Can anyone imagine how Rob May came to be the Chair of TRVG while actually being Enterprise's national rent controller? Huh? How DID that happen without raising Royal Charter Surveyors' eyebrows?

RICS will not risk having its internationally respected reputation to continue to be openly questioned just because a bunch of pubco employees and their commercial estate agent henchmen got together and decided to tell the pub industry how to raise rents by sitting on TRVG well below the conflict of interest parapet, a wall of denial which has recently been seen through.