Tribute to Tony Petty (1927-2009)
I first met Tony Petty in February 1978 on a visit to Hong Kong. As a result, his firm Tony Petty & Associates, chartered surveyors, became the first overseas member of the fledgling Australia-originated Collier Group, so we (rather pompously) named the organisation Colliers International.
Petty became the first chairman of Colliers International and, during his tenure, Colliers expanded into New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia and the UK.
These were extraordinarily interesting times, and we were really pioneering.
Petty was a big man in many ways, and he achieved a great deal in his long career. My meeting him and persuading him to join the young Collier Group Down Under was a turning point in my life and for so many others.
I am so glad the culture we established at the start of our relationship has endured as a continuing competitive advantage.
On behalf of the co-founders of Colliers, we wish health and happiness to Lenna, his wife, and their family.
Robert McCuaig, co-founder, Colliers international Property Consultants, Sydney, Australia
Tony Petty died on 15 February
Empty property rates – what relief?
A lot has been written on the subject of empty property rates recently, but much of it ignores the fundamental issues.
For more than 300 years, rates were a local tax levied on occupiers of property to fund local expenditure. It is people who consume or benefit from services, not buildings, which, when vacant, are inert.
Vacant cleared sites do not attract rates and only the most small minded would argue that the existence of an empty building on it is materially different.
The property profession has done a disservice by accepting that the absence of a liability to pay rates on empty property is some kind of “relief”. Surely any liability is a recently invented unjust imposition. The fact that vacant buildings could be taxed was not even thought of until 1966, until it occurred to another Mr G Brown.
The few outside the sane majority who support this destructive tax suggest that it has the beneficial effect of reducing property costs for the benefits of business, but nothing could be further from the truth. It is surely obvious to those who understand the property market that the overall effect is extremely damaging in much the same way as other ill-considered legislation has been.
Some of us still remember “control of office development”, “counter inflation” and various “development levies”, which all had the reverse effect to the naive intentions behind them and caused unnecessary damage to the economy, to everyone’s disadvantage.
King Canute got his feet wet demonstrating to his courtiers that you cannot change universal laws by political decree, but we have continued to ignore the lesson ever since. Trying to manipulate the natural laws of economics by ill-informed tinkering has never worked and it is just a question of how much “probably unintended” damage it causes.
The government expends immense time and resources on producing ever-increasing regulations on all manner of subjects, but it never gave a thought to looking at the banking excesses that are the main source of our present misery.
Is anyone surprised?
PK Parker, 1 Margaret Street, London W1W 8RB
