2021 Chairperson Awards

4 CEO MONTHLY / CHAIRPERSON AWARDS 2021 , Aug21851 Commercial Property Chairman of the Year (UK): Graham Chase As chartered surveyors, town planners, and experts in all things commercial property, Chase & Partners LLP provides a wide range of services that are tailored to match individual client needs and requests. Across the board, it makes itself the cornerstone advisor to retailors, businesses, institutions, Governmental and statutory bodies, local authorities, independents, and private businesses, having collectively accrued over 100 years of experience between its team with which to serve its clients. Fundamentally, it is now one of the front-running leaders in the UK commercial property market and a market lead for specialist property disciplines that is both RCIS compliant and a Registered valuer, with Chairman Graham Chase leading it from the front. Professor Graham F Chase has been lecturing at Westminster University for 35 years, where he has also been a visiting professor for over 10 years. He is an Honorary Fellow of London South Bank University, an Honorary Fellow at University College of Estate Management, and a market-based practitioner who has been keen to contribute to education as best he can by linking the market with education and vice versa. Graham is qualified as both a chartered surveyor and a chartered arbitrator and is himself highly adept in all things that the company provides to its clients, boasting significant experience when it comes to agency, marketing, professional valuation, compulsory purchase, development, investment, landlord or tenant issues, expert witness, and dispute resolution. Therefore, he is able to spearhead the growth of Chase & Partners. Indeed, this has been significant over the years as it continues to make a name for itself with its ever-growing list of competencies, all handled by the expert staff who make up its team. When he began moving into his professional life, however, Graham wasn’t always set on commercial property as a career. He began his movements in the professional world as a pilot, having attained all the necessary education and qualifications to do so, but soon found a much more poignant calling lay for him in chartered surveying, for which he quickly accrued his accreditation. Essentially, he found chartered survey duties far more interesting and rewarding, taking his first job with the BBC in their Estates, Planning, and Maintenance department, honing a keen focus on overseeing transactions as a building surveyor before moving on to a post with Ladbrokes Racing. In the latter job role, Graham found that he could focus even further within his field, funnelling his efforts into retraining in the areas of commercial transactions, qualifying as an investments and valuation surveyor and taking this forward to Clive and Lewis Partners, a dedicated leading firm of commercial property agents and surveyors. It was here that Graham truly cut his teeth on covering a wide range of activities, including occupational agency, investment agency, development, and finance. Additionally, over his time with this firm, he became a well enough known figure within the market segment that when it was merged with Edward Erdman, he left to set up Chase & Partners and was able to hit the ground running with his business. Critically, Chase & Partners grew in a quick and sustainable manner to a staff of 35 expert people, turning over in excess of £5 million per year. Keeping up with the fluctuations and dynamic nature of the market in which it works has always been a key element of the business model for Chase & Partners, and it was in these initial years that this truly began to come into its own as an element of the business model, allowing it to keep flexible and adaptive in the face of a changing market. As the customer’s spending habits and the operations of its peers morphed and shifted, Chase & Partners was able to keep up, using its advantage as a small company to be able to change its operations and activities when it suited it and ensure it was never left in the dust. Graham has led it throughout all of this; although his activities were smaller within Chase & Partners, he was able to expand it across a far wider range of property types and different activities within a smaller Chase & Partners LLP, a company that has made itself invaluable to the commercial property industry in the UK, has developed a reputation for being an incredible partner in the corner of both its clients and its staff. Led by outstanding expert in his field GrahamChase, Chase & Partners consistently brings new levels of excellence to its industry by being a voice for where the sector should go next, implementingmethodologies and ways of working that create the best results for clients, and inspire its peers.