ABOUT THE PARTNERSHIP

McDonald & Chivers was formed in early 1999 by two Bath Surveyors, Michael McDonald and Adrian Chivers, largely in response to disillusionment with the overall and presently accepted way of going about residential mortgage valuation and survey work. There was a desire to redress some of the less than complimentary public perceptions of surveying - some justified, some not – and to hopefully take our way of going about things up on to another plane that would better satisfy the expectations of the client in particular and the public in general.

The great majority of valuation and survey work in the UK is carried out by a small number of large unwieldy organisations whose high costs required a very large turnover of work. We believe the quality of such work therefore suffered. We could not see how a good job could be consistently done by Valuer/Surveyors carrying out a large volume of work, the amount of pressure it generated, the mileage travelled each day and the speed that this work had to be carried out to achieve set targets. We wanted to create a scenario where the Surveyor/Valuer could carry out just one survey, or perhaps three mortgage valuations, a day. The Surveyor/Valuer would be more relaxed, less stressed, happier, experiencing a better quality of life and thus producing a better quality of work. The survey being done on that one day would be the only one thus allowing the Surveyor/Valuer to concentrate on that job and that job only. In order to achieve this costs have been cut to create a crisp, lean, streamlined business that concentrates on the client and the job in hand, not huge income generation to feed high overheads.

Both Michael and Adrian are very experienced residential Surveyors and Valuers who have been operating in the Bath area for many years. Both live in the City. They are particularly experienced in the surveying of stone buildings, many of which are Listed as being of architectural and/or historical interest, a feature of Bath and its environs.

The area covered by the Partnership is Bath and an approximately 15 mile radius, mainly covering the Chippenham, Corsham, Melksham, Frome, Westbury, Warminster, Trowbridge, and Midsomer Norton areas of Wiltshire and Somerset. Both Michael and Adrian have been covering these areas for many years. Local knowledge is a very important aspect of the surveying and valuation profession, a matter we take very seriously. We are very reluctant to operate outside our known area, only at the specific request of the client. Michael lived in South Bristol for 10 years some while ago so is content to visit South East Bristol if requested to do so.

Michael is currently completing a Master of Science Degree in Building Conservation at Bath University.