A chartered surveyor at Lambert Smith Hampton (LSH) is rocking the boat and urging fellow sailors who work in the property world to get involved with one of the planet’s largest yacht races.
Jeremy Young, a consultant for LSH’s South Coast team based in Southampton, hopes that more chartered surveyors will sign up for the Round the Island Race in the waters around the Isle of Wight in June.
The competition, sponsored by JP Morgan Asset Management, attracts more than 1,600 competitors every year, who race the 50-mile course anti-clockwise round the island.
Jeremy hopes more companies will compete for the two Shepherds Trophies – specifically for yachts skippered by chartered surveyors or entered by property firms – following a decline in the number of entrants over the past few years.
Jeremy won the ISC trophy, which is for boats that do not race regularly, in 2011 and 2013. The other Shepherds trophy is for boats that are internationally rated for handicap racing purposes (IRC).
“I know that sailing and yacht racing is a popular sport for many chartered surveyors who use it for corporate entertainment, so I’d love to see more people from the industry enter this year’s race,” said Jeremy, who triumphed in his Maxi 1100 Musketeer.
“By encouraging people to enter I am reducing my own chances of winning for a third time but it would be great for the race to have more people from the property profession racing for these trophies.”
The trophies were donated in 1985 by Brian Shepherd. Jeremy said in that first year 37 yachts entered the IRC competition, while the most popular year for the ISC was in 1990 when 53 boats entered.
However, numbers have gradually declined and last year there were just six in the IRC and eight in the ISC, he said. The standard entry fee for the RIR is £92, with nothing extra charged for entry to the Shepherds Trophies.
LSH is a national commercial property consultancy that works with investors, developers and occupiers across the public and private sectors, and it is single-mindedly focused on UK and Irish property markets.
