Maximise Your Property Value
We appraise, but are not “appraisers”: our property advisory Valuation Team has the training, resources and mindset to assist you identify and unlock latent value in your commercial real estate … a goal we embrace as part of every property valuation and appraisal exercise.
Specialist skills: a broader perspective. The consultants in our seven professional services Divisions (Valuation, Property Tax, Lasercad® Space Measurement, Planning, Counselling, Economic Intelligence, Brokerage) are the product of our unique, seven year, post graduate training program which involves cross training, working in and with every Division. This common real estate knowledge base is important because it arms our property advisory Valuation Team with the expertise necessary to identify value adding opportunities for your real estate.
Market data drives property values. The availability of real estate sale prices, property assessments, rents, vacancy rates, operating expenses (common area maintenance & property taxes), building costs, financing, on comparable properties together with the ability to determine and analyse trends, is key to uncovering latent value in your property. Our Economic Intelligence Team conducts semi-annual market surveys on office and industrial buildings gathering commercial property rental, operating expense, property tax and vacancy data. They also undertake apartment and parking revenue and expense surveys throughout the Region. Our Property Tax Team collects a vast amount of operating data on many property types. The provincial governments feed raw sales information to our data processing department every month. CompuVal®, our proprietary leading edge IT platform acquires, processes, refines, integrates and analyses all of this data. Our Valuation Team deploys CompuVal® to benchmark your property with similar real estate and runs trend line analysis to determine if there are opportunities to add value to your property … all without additional cost to you, as part of the valuation assignment.
Informed advice: the product of trained minds. We hire direct from Atlantic Canadian universities and then enroll each of our professional staff in our unique seven year real estate training program which blends mentored commercial property work experience, the University of British Columbia’s Diploma in Urban Land Economics (DULE) and Bachelor of Business in Real Estate (BBRE) degree, negotiation courses through Dalhousie and Saint Mary’s universities, and twenty five “in house” commercial real estate Training Modules. You can be confident our property advisory Valuation Team will provide you with thorough, knowledgeable, professional real estate advice.
We listen and communicate. We recognise that property owners know more about their real estate than can be gained from our property inspection, however detailed. We start the conversation before we draft the Terms of Engagement to confirm that you are requesting the correct type of property value base and level of real estate reporting necessary to satisfy the end user of the valuation and advisory report. We continue that communication throughout the real estate assignment, making sure that we understand your business’ operational, locational and market requirements if it is a Special Purpose Property such as a fish plant or hotel.
Quality control: our cost, not our clients’. We strive to be the benchmark by which others are measured. Our property advisory Valuation Team utilises a structured process which commences with an agreed Terms of Engagement, then proceeds through the property inspection (using surveys purposed designed for your property type), captures the physical, legal and fiscal attributes of your real estate, acquires and analyses market data using our CompuVal® Knowledge Base, identifies real estate value enhancing opportunities and determines the property value conclusion. The process is designed to leave no stone unturned and is governed by a quality system registered to the ISO 9001:2015 standard. Every six months we ask our clients to measure our Work Quality Performance on a five point scale ranging from “poor” to “excellent”.
Local presence: a national outlook. Our roots have been firmly embedded in Atlantic Canada since 1976 and we keep a watchful eye on the region’s real estate markets to identify the risks and opportunities faced by an immobile asset such as your real estate. From our head office in Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) our teams fan out to our regional offices in Saint John, New Brunswick, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Toronto, Ontario. Our local presence and national reach allows us to monitor the activities of international, national, regional and local players in the various real estate markets.
Which Value?
It is a common misconception that every commercial property has a single value. Not so! Yet we are frequently asked by professionals, such accountants and lawyers, as well as real estate owners, what it will cost to appraise a (specified) property. Any conversation about a valuing your property has to start with an understanding of the purpose of the valuation and appraisal assignment. Our property advisory Valuation Team will then advise you as to which value is appropriate.
What Value?
Purchasers of real estate appraisal services often have a value amount in mind for their property. However a real estate appraiser who tailors their property valuation conclusion to their client’s expectations, commits fraud … and their client is similarly culpable if the intended deception is intended to result in financial or personal gain. It is also self-defeating: property valuation reports now rise and fall on their credibility, not just on the reputation of the firm that issues them. The bottom line: if the property valuation and advisory report is not robust enough to withstand rigorous scrutiny it is worthless.
Financial and taxation regulatory standards are constantly evolving and becoming more stringent. We therefore monitor them and meet with end users, such as the banks, on a regular basis to ensure that our valuation and advisory reports specifically address their areas of concern.
Regulated by RICS
Turner Drake & Partners Ltd. is a professional services firm regulated by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS Firm Registration #008191). RICS Rules of Conduct for members and firms are available on their web site at www.rics.org/rules.