Creepy?
1 July 2025Jul 2025 – Creepy? When you stop to think about it, the RICS is like an episode of Dr Who where an alien beast has a hold over humans that have to do its bidding.
Over 150 years ago, a few surveyors got together to decide their standards were superior to everyone else at the time so to atttract more work that was going elsewhere they set out to compete in what is arguably the only way to undermine the loyalty that would’ve existed between the lesser surveyors and their clients.
Fast forward to now and what has evolved is an organism whose tentacles have such a grip on the property market that the freedom of landlords and tenants to enter into contracts which, provided not illegal or subject to overriding legislation, is curtailed because any chartered surveyor advising must do the utmost to convince the client that what the RICS wants the RICS gets.
Take for example the latest incarnation: an updated PS for service charges in commercial property leases. Unlike residential service charges that are regulated, commercial property service charges are not. A landlord can impose whatever it likes and if a tenant doesn’t like it then tough. Unfair bad bargain agreements are rife in the commercial property market. To redress the balance, this non statutory body imposes its will on landlords by introducing to tenants a gamut of ideas that might not otherwise have been considered in a quest for standardisation regardless. In the same way the European Union is an experiment in socialism that can only work if people give up their national identity, otherwise seemingly intelligent people enlist to become brainwashed clones.
Not content with interfering in the drafting of leases, private agreements between landlords and tenants, the RICS has a monopoly on rents. Its members get to decide what rent landlords should have to accept regardless of the commercial purpose of a rent review which is to keep pace with the changing value of money. So even though surveyors do not make the market but merely interpret it for the benefit for client, a gap often exists between what the open market would pay and what the third party decides. Because unless there is evidence of what the open market would pay, which often there isn’t, the third party errs on the side of caution.
The snag with over-stepping the mark is that there comes a point when market players say enough is enough. To overcome the hassle and cost of renewing a lease, increasingly landlords want the lease outside LTA54. Next in line for the chop is the rent review which is rapidly becoming indexed linked or formulaic.
Give it another 10-20 years or so and the RICS grip will have been loosened; landlords and tenants free to return to their own devices, their advisers “unqualified” academically, instead more than enough experience.
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