Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 13 May 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Patrick Davitt:

Well, you're able to put pressure on the valuers if the valuer will take the pressure and that's fair enough, but also the valuer has to have ... like, valuers mostly ... if I could put a scenario to you, like, on a Monday morning, a valuer would go into work in his valuating office and he would see headlines, maybe on the way in, that somebody went to an auction on Friday and they bought a piece of land which is a new record price, so that record price that that particular piece of property made on the Friday previous is the new comparable that that valuer has to use if he's doing valuations in that week. He can't go back and use comparables that he had the week before that, which was probably a lesser price. So according as values moved up and valuations moved ... the valuation price moved up as well. So, like, if builders went and they paid over the top for land or whatever they paid for it, the valuer had to use those comparables, because if you didn't use those comparables you weren't doing what you were actually paid to do - you weren't doing a proper valuation of the property.