Life of a surveyor is a lowly one, even if his guess is as good as anyone else's
Quizzed before Tuesday's blockbuster land auction, the city's surveyors foresaw a moderate cash-raising exercise for the government. In the end, the Kowloon Bay strip went for $1.82 billion rather than the $1.1 billion forecast by the most bullish member of the property valuation trade.
The stock market seems to have concluded that a collective madness took over property firms, resulting in a rapid sell-off of their shares. That, however, does not seem to be the view of Francis Yuen Tin-fan, a super smooth financier who noted somewhat sniffily: 'If a surveyor gets it right, he will turn into a developer.'
We get his general drift of 'horses for courses', a point he expanded on by claiming academics were generally no good at business. But perhaps the real point is that Mr Yuen, who chairs Pacific Century Insurance, yesterday came clean on the fact that the firm had formed a 60:40 joint venture with an unnamed partner and planned to bid [not him personally, mind you] up to $1.05 billion. It turns out his firm's upper limit proved to be at more or less the top of the range forecast by the shoe-gazing wage slaves from the surveying profession.
Perhaps a slide rule and valuation tables do have some value after all.
baby-boom economics