Stakeholders critical to valuation practice, says ESVARBON

The Estate Surveyors and Valuers Registration Board of Nigeria (ESVARBON) has said it will ensure wider participation of stakeholders in its yearly gathering of estate surveyors and valuers, otherwise known as Valuers’ Assembly.

The Chairman of the Board, Gersh Henshaw, made the disclosure last week during the Board’s 2021 Valuer Assembly held in Port Harcourt, Rivers State.

Henshaw, who noted that the stakeholders in both public and private sectors were critical to enhanced valuation practice in the country, assured that the Board would reach out to them.

According to him, the stakeholders include the Bankers’ Committee, NAICOM, AMCON, BPP, BPE, Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria, EFCC, Ministries of Power, Transportation, Works and Housing, among others.

He said the Board would also invite representatives of other regulatory bodies and some major individual users of their services to share knowledge and experiences with them.

Henshaw said the new rapprochement was towards repositioning the profession and ensure its regulation.

In his goodwill message, President, Nigerian Institution of Estate Surveyors and Valuers (NIESV), Sir Emmanuel Wike, said the theme “Asset Valuation as an Economic Tool for Decision making in Emerging Markets’’ of this year’s event was a crucial issue in real estate investment with the capability of reducing appreciably the myriad of problems confronting the sector and positioning it as the key driver of national economic development.

He said: “Real estate investment is one of the panaceas for economic instability in Nigeria, no doubt. Real estate investment has the capacity of transforming the economy of Nigeria to eradicate or reduce hardship and poverty substantially. Interestingly, the emerging real estate market in Nigeria is characterised by investments in residential and commercial properties, with private developers playing key roles.”

This, according to Wike, calls for asset valuation for decision-making in facilitating loans and advances.

The NIESV’s president added that as professional estate surveyors and valuers, trained and equipped with competencies to undertake valuation of all types of assets, their valuation must be real, market-driven, focusing more on investment and direct market comparison because they are invariably suggesting to the banks that, the property developer has presented a loan guaranteed asset, good enough as collateral in the event of failure or inability to pay the loan.

The event discussed three areas. They include asset valuation as an economic tool for decision-making in emerging markets, handled by Mr. Gbenga Olaniyan; the investment and portfolio management decision by Olusegun Adebayo Ogunba; and intellectual property and small and medium scale enterprises (SMES): taking your ideas to market delivered by immediate past Chairman, Faculty of Business Divisions and Intellectual Property Valuation, Nigerian Institution of Estate Surveyors and Valuers, Bamidele Ogunleye.

In his paper, Olaniyan, who identified key challenges facing valuers in Nigeria as a breach of set valuation standards, compromising of professionalism, erroneous valuation figures, lack of information on the title to properties/assets and lack of information about the need for asset valuation, among others, urged surveyors to take charge of their industry.