RICS anticipates'post-election bounce'
News Category: Industry News
Published: 12-May-2010
We loved yesterday's real corker from the RICS in the form of its latest housing report.
You know, this is the one where more surveyors than fewer surveyors report more price rises than price decreases and that “12% more surveyors saw vendors agree a sale, up from a negative reading of 8% in March” … oh stop, our brain hurts. We’re going to have to go on a specialist RICS translation course.
But it’s this bit we really enjoy (partly because we understand it): “Sentiment rebounded in April helped by the better weather with surveyors expecting a post-election bounce.”
So, what on earth persuades the RICS to release what is, granted, the results of an April survey, but yesterday morning. By which time, not only was there no post-election bounce, but not even a post-election result?
Did the RICS, whose posh address is in the heart of Westminster and overlooks the Houses of Parliament not turn its gaze a few hundred yards to the south and realise that, in fact, there was no Parliament?
And do you suppose that when the RICS publishes its survey for May, we’ll discover that fewer rather more surveyors were not expecting a post-election bounce than in April?
However, in a bid to help feeble-minded journalists such as those at EAT understand its tortured prose, the RICS has helpfully added a ‘note to editors’ (do you suppose they could have been stung by our earlier criticism?) which explains:
“The RICS question on measuring house price changes is as follows:
“Indicate by how much average house prices have changed over the last three months. (Answers either being – falling, the same or rising).”
Now, excuse us for being stupid – though at least enjoying a working relationship with the English language – but none of those answers seems to have anything to do with the question, which asks ‘by how much’. So, how are they measuring anything?
It’s all too much for us. A padded room in a sanatorium beckons.
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