I have been with Vickery Holman for nearly two years having joined the Plymouth office in September 2020. As cliché as it sounds, my time so far really has flown by owing to the fast pace of the industry and genuinely looking forward to what each new day has to bring. Until recently, I have been working with the Valuation team producing a range of valuation reports for the purpose of secured lending, asset value and Charities Act, to name but a few, covering a wide variety of property types from industrial units to residential investments with the odd pub and farm thrown in there for good measure.
As of the beginning of this month, I received a warm welcome (thanks to Jordan and Amy) from the Lease Advisory and Business Rates Mitigation team who I will be working with over the next few months to broaden my knowledge and experience in in this sector. My time is split fairly equally between the two departments with lease advisory work involving the negotiation of lease renewals and rent reviews and providing advice to clients on the estimated rental value of their property. I am also learning that no business rates instruction is the same and that producing checks and challenges for our clients can relate to splits and mergers of properties relating to new occupation, removal of properties from the rating list that are undergoing substantial redevelopment, or backdating VOA inaccuracies relating to floor areas etc.
During my time with VH, there has been a huge amount of support available to me through my APC journey. VH place a lot of value in their graduates, and we are fortunate to have Nicola who is our dedicated training manager and APC Counsellor. We benefit from regular graduate and company-wide training days which cover a variety of relevant topics from measurement to ethics and building defects. These training days also allow graduates across the offices to meet up and build good working relationships – whether this is helping each other out with revision or attending networking events together. I will be spending the day in the Truro office towards the end of the month to join the team for a football and pizza evening with a number of other local firms, so fingers crossed the good weather stays around for a bit longer!
