TECHNOBUREAUCRACY AND CITY LIFE OTHER PARASITES Most building society managers place a heavy reliance on the expertise of various professionals such as « valuers » and « surveyors » in order to understand and predict changes in the housing market in the locality. Not surprisingly membership of local clubs such as the Rotary and the Freemasonry movement is of great importance to society managers, surveyors, solicitors, valuers and other parasites. All these organisations are involved in the peripheral areas of housing sale and purchase. They are not usually controlled by any institution because there is no need for them to be. They rely on the building societies for their commissions on sales. Estate agents advertise most of the properties that are sold, valuers (often part of an estate agency firm) value the property both for the building society to decide on the amount it wishes to advance and for the prospective buyers, solicit.9~rs waste enormous amounts of time (and receive hunge payments) over the legalities of« conveyancing», and so on and so forth. Jn the financial year of 1975/76, total of £338 million was paid in« transaction costs». The total outgoings in housing purchase (including « transaction costs ») were £ 2,964 million. The most interesting of these parasites because of the multiplicity of roles they perform are the estate agents. It is difficult to determine the exact number of estate agents in Britain because there is no compulsory registration system. Nevertheless, in 1974/75 there were 24,000 estate agents listed in the Estate Agents Directory, 6,000 of which were members of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) and 8,000 were members of the Incorporated Society of Valuers and Auctioneers (ISVA). The activities covered by the term « estate agent» include house sales, surveying, valuing, auctioneering, property management, and frequently they also act as insurance and mortgage brokers as well. There are three different types of estate agent: - individual agents, multiple practices and prestige agents. The multiples and the prestige agents tend to have the staff with estate agency qualifications. Although agents do not have to register with any organisation a great number of them are on the the lists of the Estate Agents Council, which was begun in 1968. The RICS and ISVA are the two most important organisations with estate agents in their ranks and they try to impose stringent professional codes of practice on their 33
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