A few interesting aspects of my life, my work and career:
I was born shortly after the second World War being 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 there told him that he showed great promise and ability, so he developed the ambition to become a consultant surgeon in London after the war.
My father personally chose to be a medical professional, as opposed to choosing a possibly more lucrative business career.
When I was about five, and after my parents had saved up for some years, they had scraped enough together to practically buy a vacant detached four bedroomed house near the hospital where he then worked in North London. Relatives happily lent my parents the rest 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 to upgrade the house whilst we lived there. The carpets from our old house were re-used in some of the 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 rather quickly, while people like my father could only earn enough in salary to support their families adequately from month to month. This naturally further impacted upon those who also had mortgages to pay.
We three children didn’t have much by way of toys and pocket money but we did obtain a private education. I left school with a clutch of O levels and two A levels and after that, went to the local technical college to enrol on a mechanical engineering course. Being uncertain about engineering as my chosen career I was later fortunate to find employment at The Borough Valuer’s Office, not far from home. There was a massive town centre re-development under way at that time and the authority needed to employ technically-minded people, prepared to learn how to do property 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 fellow trainees from our office to sit the external RICS examinations. This took myself along with the other young surveyors four full years to accomplish. I achieved my RICS qualification in 1974.
That said, the knowledge I then gained over the following 40 or so years in surveying work at a variety of jobs around the country certainly provided me with a stimulating long-term career.
It had been clear to me all along however, that things were very far from well in terms of the lack of fluidity within our housing markets; with the level of buyer satisfaction across England and Wales being left very clearly wanting.
Having already 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 already 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. Despite this ambition I failed to achieve that and had to obtain a small one soon after completing the renovation project. I’d committed myself to a project taking well over a year to complete and costing more than my savings at the time.
I found new employment soon after practically completing the cottage and we moved in with great excitement. However in the eighties, earnings as a qualified surveyor, along with most other types of work, did not offer a particularly high salary bracket, yet house prices were accelerating, interspersed with increasingly frequent and sometimes unpredictably-timed price slumps. It had become a known fact that house price levels were by then on the increase yet becoming beyond regular earnings levels in the amounts of their increases.
Having carefully chosen a series of more saleable houses over time, my level of earnings was effectively doubled by the increases 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 the 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 for themselves 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. Even so, 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 become a step-change in the then government’s 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 wealth and stability. However, the question remains – for how long can such a risk averse policy continue without unpalatable downsides starting to materialise.
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 overly reluctant to look into new proposals such as mine with an objective eye.
I believe the whole method and process of house-marketing, including our residential planning control systems themselves, which were originally conceived in 1947, now need reformatting for the twenty first Century. My interest in publishing my thinking on this has been driven primarily by this 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 the necessary changes into full effect.
Please enjoy looking through this web site. It contains many fresh new ideas and proposals as to how such changes might be achieved for the benefit of the whole of our population. My ambition is to bring both affordability and sustainability within housing and house ownership within the reach of everyone. You are welcome to add your own thoughts and comments on this blog if you should feel so inclined.