Q&A session with Stuart Birrell

In this episode, Stuart Birrell talks about party wall fees, good practices, training for Party Wall surveyors and much more.
You can also watch this interview on YouTube.
Transcription
Philippe: Hi, hi and welcome to another edition of Party Wall Pro Podcast and today I’m very excited to have Stuart Birrell with me from Murray Birrell. He’s a Fellow of the RICS and 40 years into the job, if I’m not mistaken.
You are also a member of the London Committee of the Pyramus & Thisbe Club. We have a few questions that our audience have sent through that we’re going to go through. But before we start, Stuart Birrell, how did you get to where you are? Give us a bit of background of where you come from and how you ended up here?
Stuart: It’s a long story. It’s 43 years now incidentally. I got into surveying by complete accident. I left school, had enough of education, worked on building sites and hurt my back. I went to what used to be called the employment office to sign on and they told me, “You can’t sign on until you’ve applied for jobs.”
I had been on a course with John Lane when I was at school. So I said, “Quantity Surveyor” and they said: “do you want to be a quantity surveyor”. “No, I don’t. But you asked me to put a name down, so I have. Went for a couple of interviews, didn’t like them and I eventually ended up having an interview with somebody called a building surveyor, which I had never actually heard of. And I quite like technical drawing and is what you did in those days when you started. So I took the job and the rest is history really. That was in 1982. I became a fellow in 1995. Keith and I started our business 1992. So we’re 25 years old now. So yeah, it has been a long time.
Philippe: Yeah, you’ve seen it all. So 25 years in the business. How is it going?
Stuart: Yes, it’s doing OK. We’ve grown organically. We’ve never been great businessmen. We’re suppliers basically. But we’ve done OK. We’re still talking to each other, which is amazing really.
Philippe: Yes. So how did you meet Keith and decided to start a business together?
Stuart: Well, yeah. We had virtually parallel careers. I met him at college in the late ’70s and we qualified on the same day. I got him a job where I was working at John Pellings at the time. We became senior surveyors on the same day and associates on the same day, partners on the same day and eventually we left on the same day. So it’s rather boring really. But yeah, met him a long, long time.
Philippe: And from the general surveying into party wall – I’m not sure what the kind of ratio party wall to other general building surveyor work you’re doing at Murray Birrell. But how did you end up developing this specialism?
Stuart: You’re looking for income streams running a business, within your skill set. It has to be within your skill set I think. Both of our history, we’re contract surveyors really. That’s what we grew up doing. Mainly maintenance and rehabilitation of existing buildings. You get involved in party walls when you’re doing it. So you start doing it. You learn a little bit. You work with people. You listen. You learn. 15, 20 years ago, it was probably a negligible part of our business. Now it’s about 22, 23 percent roughly and we do a lot of licenses to alter, we still do a lot of construction work. We do dilapidations. So we do most things that building surveyors do. But I sort of specialised to a greater degree over the last, last 10, 12 years I suppose really.
Philippe: And enjoying it?
Stuart: Yes, I do. It’s less confrontational than doing construction work. So it amuses me when people say, “Oh, you’re being really difficult.” You don’t know what difficult is.” People want to punch your head off in construction work… I do enjoy it. I do enjoy it.
Philippe: Now that’s inter