A few interesting aspects of my life, work and career:
I was born after the second World War as the middle child in a three child family, whose father had left Edinburgh University with a medical degree and a post graduate degree in surgery. His mentors at the faculty of surgery told him that he showed great promise and ability, so he held the ambition to become a consultant surgeon in London.
My father personally chose to be a medical professional, as opposed to choosing a possibly more lucrative business career.
When I was about five years old and after my parents had saved for some years, they were able to scrape enough together to buy a vacant detached four bedroomed house near the hospital where he then worked in North London. Relatives happily lent my parents some of the money to allow the house purchase to take place without a mortgage. At the time, purchasers seemed to be thin on the ground and mortgages were more scarce still.
Our new and larger house had been empty and on the market for some while before we moved in. It needed fully re-wiring and had no central heating of course. Builders did the complicated work whilst we lived there and the carpets from our old house were re-used in our bedrooms. We did our own decorating, only employing decorators to do such things we could not manage, such as wallpapering the ceilings!
I became aware, quite early on, that the prices of houses, even in those days, were accelerating quite fast, while people like my father could only earn enough in salary to support their families adequately. This naturally impacted upon those who also had to make mortgage repayments.
We three children didn’t have much by way of toys and pocket money but we did each get a private education. I left school with a clutch of O levels and two A levels and then went to the local technical college to try my hand at a mechanical engineering course. Being uncertain about engineering as my chosen career I was fortunate to then find employment at The Borough Valuer’s Office, not far from home. There was a massive town centre re-development going on at that time and the authority needed to employ technically-minded people prepared to learn how to do valuation and negotiation work. I became a trainee valuer with the prospect of training and qualifying to become a Chartered Surveyor. I started this work in the late sixties. It involved both day release and later a lengthy University-based correspondence course, enabling several trainees to sit the RICS external examinations. This took myself and the other young surveyors four full years to accomplish. I achieved my RICS qualification in 1974.
That said, the knowledge I gained over the following 40 or so years worth of surveying experience working in numerous jobs around the country certainly provided me with a stimulating career.
It had been clear to me all along however, that things were very far from well, in terms of the general lack of fluidity within the housing markets, with buyer satisfaction in housing markets across England and Wales left clearly wanting.
Having married, and after starting a family of our own, my new wife and I chose to leave London and move to a village in Worcestershire where we had friends. We started a new life there after having bought a derelict cottage by auction. I started to renovate this, doing most of the work myself and having a gap in employment. Like my father, I attempted to build a family home without getting a mortgage but I failed to achieve that and had to obtain one soon after completing the renovation project. I’d committed myself to a project taking well over a year and costing more than my savings at the time.
I found new employment soon after completing the cottage structurally and moving my family in but in the eighties, earnings as a regular surveyor did not come with a particularly high salary bracket. House prices were, by then, accelerating, interspersed with increasingly frequent and sometimes unpredictably-timed slumps. It had, by then, become a known trend that house price levels were on the increase and generally beyond regular earnings levels in the amount of their increases.
Having carefully chosen a series of more saleable houses over time, my level of earnings was effectively doubled by the increase in value of the houses we had owned and occupied. It seemed you just had to move whilst prices were starting to increase and you could soon double your earnings from such increases in capital values in just a few years – crazy though this may seem!
It later became clear that some people were scaling-up their house buying activities and reaping more profits than one-house buyer could ever imagine. There followed a succession of property bonanzas over the years. Of course I keenly monitored this as a professional valuer but I chose to stay on the sidelines, only owning the house that we were living in at any one time. Yet, doing this was still enough to enhance my earnings quite substantially.
Around the turn of the Millennium I had become a building society panel valuer and saw, first hand, how market price levels were becoming overly influenced by borrowing. By then they were rising unexpectedly swiftly and it seemed that the government itself had cottoned on to the idea of allowing house prices to inflate as part of their macro-economic policy. This had clearly become a step-change in their then housing policies. It now seems, to me anyway, that this has since become an integral part of government policy in order to keep our economy expanding in its wealth and stability. However, the question remains – for how long can such a bizarre policy continue without unpalatable downsides starting to take effect?
During my time as a panel valuer, I began to wonder whether the RICS had so many professional members paying fees whom were involved in estate agency, that the Institution may have become reluctant to look into new proposals such as mine as objectively as they otherwise might have.
I believe the whole method and process of house-marketing, including our residential planning control systems themselves, which were originally conceived in 1947, need reformatting for the twenty first century. My interest in publishing my thinking on this has been driven primarily by that sincere belief.
It is being said today, at long last, that it’s time for change.
I hope the recently elected Labour Government will be bold enough to put such necessary change into good effect?
Please enjoy looking through this web site, full of fresh ideas and proposals as to how such a change might be achieved for the benefit of the whole population at large. My ambition is to bring both affordability and sustainability within housing and house ownership within reach of everyone. You are welcome to add your own thoughts and comments on this blog if you wish.