This post was prompted by a number of things. Firstly a recent visit to Malham, in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales National Park. but also by an ongoing itch that I ought to be writing more, and getting some of the issues in my head out onto "paper". I still want to show off some of my pictures and so on, but since so many of them have back-stories, I think I ought to share some of those stories, maybe an odd one or two might actually be interesting, who knows?
After graduating back in 1993, as a (potential) Chartered Surveyor, from Sheffield, with no real focus on what I wanted to do, nor where, I ended up via a series of dead-end Estate Agent type jobs, and a long spell or two in a factory making shelving units, but I'd rather not talk about that now, in the Valuation Office in Harrogate. This was a initially a six month "short-term contract", the fore-runner of the zero hours contract perhaps in some ways, but I digress.
There had been a national re-valuing of the entire housing (and commercial) property market, overseen by the VO, and given the scale of economies, a lot of corners were cut. The old style "Rateable Value" had to be updated, it was pretty basic and archaic to put it mildly, and Maggy's ill-considered, or at least implemented attempts to bringing in a "Poll-tax" base on everyone paying their fair share towards their local authorities' spending had gone badly awry, to put it mildly. That's ancient history now, but I suspect the finer details of the subject will raise their heads again before we all get too much older, again I digress, but bear with me.
The rush to re-value everything was bound to make mistakes, "market value" which was the basis for the work, was such a subjective thing after all, and trying to value a whole housing estate on a £ per square foot basis a recipe for controversial valuations. People, quite rightly, objected in many, many, many cases, and so a scheme to allow them to appeal had to be created. Cue an onslaught of tens of thousands of appeals, per local authority, per VO, for many, often more than justified reasons.
Somehow, I can't quite remember now how, I found myself getting through an interview, and starting work valuing houses in the Harrogate District. Nearly two hours away from home, but a fairly straight forward job based on inspecting houses, meeting their owners, and hearing their objections, and drinking copious amounts of tea.....
In time the office dealing with this had to expand, the scale of the issue was simply just too huge to cope with, more graduates were brought in to augment the stressed out existing civil servants, all of us on the short term contractual basis, and all keen to make a go of it.
After not a huge amount of hand-wringing and constant reviews of how the appeals were going, a few of us were taken to one side to "specialise". We'd shown an aptitude for dashing through dozens of appeals in a day, way ahead of our civilian counterparts, and the team had come to realise that there was a particular peculiar type of property that only currently had one, albeit senior, valuer working on it. Farms and other miscellaneous rural business related "composite" properties. Composite in this context meant that they were made up of business AND domestic living units, more often than not in an indistinguishable fashion.
What basis do you value such properties on? They are nearly always unique, location, size, and a distinct lack of comparable properties to use to glean a potential resale value....
I could launch into an esoteric essay on the subject, and nearly have to be fair, but want to cut to the chase, as it were.
Farms, North Yorkshire, Craven District (Utterly gorgeous area), and a chunk of the Harrogate District too, (ditto):
Owner occupied? Some, sure, but far from all.
Tenanted? If so, on what terms? As in, who pays what?
Proximity of the "business end" of the farm, as in animals, related buildings and other miscellaneous matters to the "living accommodation" ....Think about cows/pigs/sheep/etc and their by-products in particular.....The layout of a farm was stressed as a valuation issue in the scheme of things. Did you have clean or dirty access to the house via the yard? (for example)
Services? Many of these farms weren't on ANY "Mains" services, their own water, their own sewerage, solid fuel, maybe even a windmill or something...
Accessibilty? Some of these farms were over 5 miles from the nearest village, let alone school/hospital/shops etc. What was their actual drive like? Some were miles long, which they would have had to maintain.....
To compare a rented six bedroomed farmhouse, in one of the most glorious parts of the country, with an owner-occupied former farmhouse of equivalent volume and acreage maybe, was simply put NOT comparing "like with like". While many, nay, most even, landlords might well look after their estates with beneficence and good husbandry, there a good few who just don't.... How then can we expect the occupiers to then pay the same as their wealthy neighbours?
I visited one farmhouse, which we passed when we went up to Malham, on the high roads over to Settle, that the occupier could only use three rooms, out of ten. On my visit Mr Logan showed me snowdrifts in three of the bedrooms.....He lived in the kitchen, in front of the Aga, as his landlord refused to accept that there was any liability on his part to repair. The dispute wasn't supposed to be taken into account in my valuation, but sometimes you just have to be real...
As a footnote, it turned out that he liked to down a bottle of scotch and then drive over to Blackpool, over an hour away when sober, to "socialise" more than once a week...but that wouldn't have swayed my very generous valuation!
There were many cases throughout the spectrum, and I often wonder how many of my generous valuations were "corrected" afterwards, after I'd left the VO, but over-zealous but everso ruthless and efficient valuers.......
Still, that whole world still exists in my head, if not real life, and I like to think that I made a positive difference to a lot of North Yorkshire farmers along the way.... Visiting the area two or three weeks ago was a lovely tonic, and provided a lot of memory-lane wandering for this increasingly aging gardener, reminiscing about one of the best jobs I ever had....
