Not long ago there were murmurs in the wings of a virus making life difficult in China, then almost overnight, or so it seemed, we all found ourselves in lockdown and immersed in a New Normal as many call it.
As a solicitor in the commercial property sector, I am glad to have had the opportunity to share with Rod Welfare, a director of Fifield Glyn Chartered Surveyors, some of our experiences of how the lockdown has affected our working practice and property transactions in North London and more generally.
For our clients it goes without saying that these are difficult times and the long term impact on business for some may not become clear until we emerge from lockdown and the market starts to recover. Ongoing challenges include for landlords the balance between protecting their rental stream while preserving their tenants’ ability to trade after lockdown and for tenants the need to preserve the right to occupy their premises in the longer term while cutting costs so that their businesses can survive. More recently some lenders have mortgage transactions on hold pending re-valuation.
Despite a halt to many transactions, there continues an undercurrent of activity in the market keeping both Rod and I occupied.
On my part, some lease renewals and landlord and tenant estate management work continues as does re-financing where the loan to value ratio is good. Furthermore, there still seems to be a few cash-ready developers about who are looking to obtain options to purchase or to enter into agreements to buy subject to getting planning in place, in this way securing their prospects until the planning process and construction supply chain picks up again. However, in the hope of a gradual market recovery into next year, landowners involved would do well to speak to a valuer before assuming that it is all doom and gloom and agreeing to tie their land up with a view to selling at a fixed and deflated value.
Rod reports that investors and portfolio owners and those needing probate valuations continue to keep Rod and his colleagues occupied and the surveyors’ work outside of the office continues without too much difficulty. Rod has found to be key the need to maintain the right balance of communication while following the social distancing rules and so they have adapted their practices in order to carry out valuations and inspections where premises are unoccupied and to inspect exteriors of buildings in the course of estate management. Back at their desks their estate management work continues but along with a shift to dealing with tenant concerns and arranging rent deferments as a more direct consequence of Covid 19. The good news for clients and property owners is that this sort of work is still possible in some cases and they should speak to their surveyor and see if a way forward can be found.
On the logistical front, for legal advisers the manual processing and delivery of documents, having signatures witnessed or sworn, and so forth have become trickier. I am sure there are many more examples that others can recite. Most tasks remain possible however, simply slower, and sharing imaginative solutions with others working in the field has become key. An example is the sheer relief at being able to find a solicitor in a local office who is prepared to witness statutory declarations safely through an open window on the ground floor of his office building.
Thankfully for both Rod and I our respective firms’ IT systems have held up well so far and seem to support remote working well. Also I have found our clients to be generally patient and helpful in overcoming the challenges faced and it has these days become more of a matter of all sides working in tandem to get paperwork where it should be and transactions completed.
What has proven important to both of us has been keeping in touch with colleagues and to feel anchored to the mothership while spending so long at home. To this end and through the gloom have emerged new online platforms such as Zoom and Teams. and what a useful tool they have proven to be.
Then of course there is the new lockdown terminology which we now utter without second thought – social distancing, furloughing, rent deferment, Zoom one-to-ones, the Two Metre Rule, windshield-witnessing, (to which I can now add ‘windowsill-witnessing) and so on.
Rod refers to changes in the ways that property is being marketed and sold with a marked increase in reliance on online technology. Online auctions have come into their own as a popular means of selling which is good news, but in addition video marketing seems to be yielding results, more than some may have expected. Maybe this is an example of new habits which might become part of common practice when the market has recovered.
As Rod says, ‘coming out of lockdown will prove difficult, keeping social distancing, we are going to have to be flexible and imaginative. It will be interesting to see if eventually working patterns change or revert back’.
The writer Hannah Collins is an Associate in the commercial property team in Curwens’ Enfield Office.
Hannah thanks Rod Welfare for his contribution. He is a director at Fifield Glyn Chartered Surveyors and splits his time (in normal times) between their Mayfair and Edgware offices.
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