Commercial Valuations

If you want to maximise returns from property occupation or investment, it is essential to know what it’s worth. This knowledge is the key to strategic and operational boardroom decisions as well as providing the smaller business owner, investor or lender with vital information to guide their actions.

We are able to use our valuation expertise to help you find and negotiate commercial property either for occupation or investment.

Whether you are an owner-occupier, tenant, property investor or lender, commercial property and land is usually your most important single fixed asset.

As members of the RICS, we at RDN Surveyors must follow the Appraisal and Valuation Standards (‘The Red Book’). This ensures consistency of valuation practice, demonstrates high standards of integrity and provides a benchmark in reporting and giving this service to our clients.

We make sure that:

• We are suitably qualified and have the experience to carry out your instruction
• We let you know if there is any actual or perceived threat to our independence and objectivity
• We let you know the matters to be addressed when agreeing conditions of engagement
• We let you know the basis of the valuation, assumptions and material considerations that must be taken into account
• You can guarantee at least a minimum-reporting standard professionally fit for the purpose
• We set out matters that should be disclosed when valuations may be relied upon by others

We regularly provide valuations for the following reasons:

Secured lending

The lender needs to be satisfied that if the borrower defaults, the property can be sold to recover the outstanding debt plus interest and any other costs. The valuer has to take a suitably cautious approach to the market value and be satisfied that it could be readily sold at the figure reported.

Company accounts

Valuations prepared for inclusion in financial statements are either:

- on the basis of ‘market value’ if surplus or held as an investment
- on the basis of ‘existing use value’ if used by the occupier for their business (assumes the continuation of that use)

Sales Purchases and Taxation

Formal reports needed prior to selling or buying are different from the appraisal given by estate agents. These are also provided to meet the standards of the RICS ‘Red Book’.

Valuation reports for taxation may be for probate (Inheritance Tax), or Capital Gains Tax reasons, where a market value is needed to fix a base on which tax is calculated when the property is sold or transferred. RDN Surveyors’ records go back a particularly long way, and the earliest date at which we are regularly called to value is 31 March 1982!

Pensions

The transfer of a property into or out of a pension fund requires a market valuation report in a particular format to satisfy the needs of actuaries and pension legislation. This is often provided with open market rental values where trustees of the pension fund have leased the property to, say, the business. This latter figure would be updated at regular intervals following the formal lease between the two parties.