Academic qualifications
14 April 2026(2026-Apr: LinkedIn >1959 views) Academic qualifications in the property world used to mean something. That the person had made an effort to learn and had proved they’d absorbed by passing an examination. The process continues. Except that there are so many people doing it that somehow it has lost its meaning and instead has become an expensive way of not meaning as much as it did.
To have become a chartered surveyor involved a lot of studying before the hallowed ceremony. But not anymore. Nowadays a person can become a chartered surveyor at the halfway stage. Perhaps a form of encouragement or simply another way of extracting money but whatever the point, to become an AssocRICS doesn’t make sense.
What a chartered surveyor is allowed to do also doesn’t make sense. Registered Valuer? Surely if someone is allowed to call themselves a chartered surveyor they should be allowed to accept instructions for anything they want?
For a firm to call itself (name) chartered surveyors doesn’t require all its principals to be chartered surveyors.
Then again there are many things about the RICS that don’t make sense. For example, for an organization that promotes ethics and professional standards, it permits the unethical practice of seeing nothing wrong in its members acting for the tenant at one rent review and acting for the tenant’s landlord at the next review. I wouldn’t do that. Even if the tenant wouldn’t want to reinstruct me I still wouldn’t if asked act for the landlord.
As for the way it handles complaints against third parties, the one and only time I’ve done that, every aspect of my complaint was parried as if the third party couldn’t possibly have done anything wrong. It did introduce me to some requirements that I have since requested, such as wanting the third party to provide a timesheet for the costs. But I’ve yet to encounter a third party that will comply with the RICS GN that third parties ought not charge the same hourly rate for administrative tasks.
When you stop to think about it, there are not many things in the property market that need a chartered surveyor. Agency? No. Valuations? No. Schedule of Dilapidations / Condition? No. Rent Review? No. Advice? No. Rateable Value? No. Expert Witness? No. Single Joint Expert Witness for Court? Yes. During the past 2 years I have been instructed to find flaws in several chartered surveyor SJEW reports; I find far too many.
Let’s face it. Standards are slipping and the one organization that could do something about it isn’t.
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