or our readers who may not know of you, please tell us a little about your career development to date. I am a chartered surveyor and chartered arbitrator. My first job was as a building surveyor at the BBC in 1976, followed by a spell from 1978 at Ladbrokes as a regional estate manager, joining Clive Lewis and Partners Commercial Property Agents and Consultants on 1 January 1980. I was appointed an equity partner in 1985, heading up the retail division before merging with Edward Erdman to form Colliers Erdman Lewis in 1993, where I was chairman of the retail group. I left in 1994 and set up Chase and Partners, which commenced trading on 1 June 1995. 27 years of progress has seen the company change and evolve with the ebb and flow of market conditions, employing over 50 people by 2005 but now much smaller and operating with a wide range of consultants brought in to work on specific projects which requires their expertise. As well as chartered surveyors, Chase & Partners are chartered town planners and I have practiced as a chartered arbitrator in alternative dispute resolution for over 20 years as a member of both the RICS and CIArb dispute resolution panels. I have been a lecturer at Westminster University for over 30 years and about 10 years ago was appointed as a visiting professor. I have held several other posts at a number of universities and have always felt this relationship with education has helped me in my day job as a market-based estate agent and dispute resolver. If you are going to teach others, you must know the subject yourself – an exceptionally good discipline. What first prompted you to train as a chartered surveyor? I won an RAF Flying Scholarship and was encouraged to go to Cranwell and train F 14 AUG 2022 WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM property work, and it is the people in the property industry that make things happen. The key is to understand that markets will dominate, and that nobody is bigger than a market. You can become involved, influence and be active in taking advantage of market shifts and trends, but you cannot beat markets – as many major companies and governments have found to their cost. It is therefore critical to be immersed in markets and understand who the players are, what they require, how they operate and where value is secured from their activities. If you understand these fundamentals and work hard at staying connected and ahead of the mass markets, you will succeed. Arrogance, laziness and a lack of understanding of what is happening all around you will cause you to fail. A common mistake is an expectation that you can predict the future – nobody can. The trick is to understand the history, background and trends, gauge where economies are and feel comfortable making decisions based on informed understanding. However, if you believe you can predict the future, that will be the start of your problems. I believe in a degree of luck, but you tend to make your own luck. as an RAF pilot but applied instead for a scholarship with BOAC. At the same time, an airline company called Court Line went into receivership, releasing some 200 pilots onto the market who were taken up by BOAC, cancelling all their student pilot training. My father suggested I look at surveying as he knew I got on with people and liked activity, not being stuck behind a desk. It was the best move I made as I have had an enjoyable, interesting, and exciting career which has constantly changed. When I gave up flying as a private pilot in my mid-30s, I realised I would have been bored flying a bus around the skies. In the course of your work you have overseen the management and development of retail, food, leisure and healthcare properties. What unique considerations had to be made when handling these distinct sectors? Although distinct sectors, they have two things in common – property and people. It is always the people who make the business that is conducted from the
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