Why Residential Surveying Carries the Highest Duty of Care
This Is Surveying
Surveyors UK
- Careers, Jobs & CPD
- Property/Built Environment
- Residential & Housing
- Risk, Legal & Insurance
Get it wrong on someone’s home, and there’s no cheque big enough to fix it. That’s the highest duty of care in the profession, says Richard Ballam, a chartered surveyor and owner of Rickards Oliver in Manchester.
He talks Nina Young through his own unlikely route into surveying, a failed career in chemistry, a life-changing fall from a ladder, and a mortgage report that worked out at £400 a word.
The conversation also covers the realities of running an independent firm, the corporate versus independent debate, and where AI fits into report writing today. Richard opens up on the human side of the job too, from difficult repossessions to sitting with clients over a cup of tea, and why he believes the next generation of surveyors are just as sharp as ever.
What We Cover
- From chemistry and a PhD to becoming a chartered surveyor
- Discovering surveying through mortgage valuation reports
- Starting and running an independent surveying firm
- The difference between corporate and independent surveying
- Training, mentoring and learning from other surveyors
- AI and the changing way clients read and analyse survey reports
- Using AI to support site note collection
- The importance of professional judgement and accountability
- Remote working and the loss of informal knowledge sharing
- The future of residential surveying and diversity in the profession
- Manchester, regional development and the RICS North West Board
- Technology and what’s exciting in surveying
Guest Links
Richard Ballam
Rickards Oliver
Useful Links
RICS North West Board
RICS and Alliance Manchester Business School Launch
Guest Bio
Richard Ballam is a chartered surveyor and valuer and the owner and director of Rickards Oliver, an independent surveying firm based in Manchester covering primarily the North West. Richard has worked across both corporate and independent surveying and brings more than 25 years of experience to his work. His background is unusual, having originally studied chemistry and started a PhD before moving into surveying. He is also involved with the RICS North West Board, where he is focused on reconnecting with local membership, CPD and links with the wider business and academic community. His interests include residential surveying, professional practice, technology and the practical use of AI and drones within surveying.
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Connect with me – Nina Young on LinkedIn
Transcript
Nina Young: 00:08
Hello and welcome. You’re listening to This Is Surveying, the podcast shining a light on the people, ideas, and stories shaping this incredible profession. I’m Nina Young, founder of Surveyors UK and the Surveying Room, the community bringing surveyors together, breaking down silos, and making surveying visible. So for now, let’s dive into our latest episode. Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week’s episode of This Is Surveying. Today’s guest on the show, I’m very pleased to welcome and know Richard well, is Richard Ballon. Hi, Richard.
Richard Ballon: 01:03
Hello. Hello.
Nina Young: 01:04
And Richard is a chartered surveyor and valuer. He’s also the owner and director of Rickard’s Oliver, based out in Manchester, who cover primarily the northwest area. Is that correct, Richard?
Richard Ballon: 01:03
Yes, it is, yes.
Nina Young: 01:04
And so I’m very keen to get Richard on. He has been highly recommended to me as a guest. I’m not setting him up too much. But we’ve got some great topics to talk about today. And I think the first one, which is always an interesting one, is around sort of how you became a surveyor. And I think you said some what would you — you said failed careers or something, but how is it? How did you get into—
Nina Young: 01:30
it?
Richard Ballon: 01:30
It’s fascinating. It was my first failed career. I was going to be a research chemist, and I had a first-class degree in chemistry, and the next step then is going to do a PhD. So I was doing a PhD and had a lovely non-surveying-related accident. I fell off a ladder. I was helping our local parish church, getting ready for Easter, cleaning some windows, and I managed to fall 15 feet onto the stone floor. And with obvious consequences, smashing up my leg. And I had in the end six weeks in hospital and nine months of rehabilitation.
Nina Young: 02:07
Oh wow. I love the way you’re laughing about it, Richard.
Richard Ballon: 02:10
It changed my life. And I went back to university, yeah. Well, once I sort of got back on my feet, went back to university. And what I hadn’t appreciated when I started PhD, because I was the first one in the family to go to university, was the career path. If you wanted to be academic, you know, university lecturer or something, you had to be absolutely top of the game. And I knew, despite a first-class degree, I wasn’t top of the game. Yeah, so somewhat plotting along nicely in the middle, but was never going to do that. And to get jobs in the industry, you had to do PhD followed by a couple of two-year contracts. And then aged about 30, you might get a job. And if you did, you’d quit them. But the industry was all moving overseas, and I looked at this, I thought, this is so uncertain. I’m not even the best person in the room, let alone the best in the country. So I thought, yeah, I’m wasting my time here. So I pulled out and I moved back to Manchester on the basis that there’s always work there. Straight into the lovely graduate route of dead-end office jobs.
Nina Young: 03:12
Yeah, yeah, that’s very typical. I think we’ve all done that.
Richard Ballon: 03:15
And after a couple of jobs, I end up at what is now Santander, what used to be Abbey National for the older listeners. Yes, yeah, good Abbey. And they were in the process of moving everything out of branches into big admin centres. So I end up in one in South Manchester, and one of the jobs was writing the mortgage offer. So you’d gather information from all sorts of places and put it into a letter, and the customer would get it. And of course, you had to read survey reports as part of that to pull out the valuation. Did that match up to the purchase price and all the rest of it? So I was suddenly reading survey mortgage valuations all day long, and it was always quite interesting. You’d have a quick read of them and so on. It had about two minutes to read them because in reality you’re trying to, you know, pull a few numbers out of them.
Speaker 3: 04:06
Yeah.
Richard Ballon: 04:06
And I read one one day on a fairly modern house at the time, you know, detached house, four bedrooms, and all the boxes ticked. And Surveyor’s General Remarks was always the exciting bit, because in those days it wasn’t really standard paragraphs. And it said, and I can still remember the exact wording, it said, “appears satisfactory.” And I looked down at the form of the fee, 800 quid, and thought, well, okay, 400 pounds a word. I think I could manage that. And I actually phoned the RICS the same day. I said, look, I’d really quite lik
Richard Ballam
chartered surveyor and valuer and the owner and director of Rickards Oliver
