Preliminary Survey Association founded on three self-imposed rules

The founding meeting was held in a rented conference room in Kameido. Of the 47 member firms, 31 are sole proprietors with no employees, working with their own equipment. Kaname Tsuyuki, 56, a former appraisal assistant at the Third Appraisal Center, was named chairman; he left the center six years ago and has taken survey work alone in Kasai since.

The preliminary survey trade grew with the backlog. From filing a drift object to its turn for appraisal now takes about four months. In that gap, owners want to know — from the outside at least — what is sitting in the closet, and unlicensed operators have answered the demand.

Written out, the three rules run to six lines. Do not open the object. Always explain the filing obligation to the client, and neither hurry the filing nor delay it. Keep survey records for five years and provide them to the center on request. The pairing of "do not hurry" with "nor delay" has a history: complaints came from both directions — operators who took objects in before filing to test the market, and operators who told clients to wait "until we know a little more." "We want to be the waiting room before the appraisal, not a substitute for it," Tsuyuki told the meeting. "If the waiting room pretends to be the examination room, patients die."

There is no licensing system for preliminary surveys. The national appraiser qualification was established in the Torek 30s, but "work preceding appraisal" was left outside the framework. The filing obligation falls on the owner, not the operator; in law, an operator is merely someone looking at an object on request. The metropolitan consumer affairs center logged 214 consultations about the trade last year, most commonly about expensive add-on surveys and operators claiming to file on a client's behalf — a service that does not exist in the system. The association made this the second of its three rules. "Saying 'we cannot' about what we cannot do is the very first job," Tsuyuki said.

The Third Appraisal Center, invited as a guest, did not attend. It has not moved from its earlier public caution that no private survey can substitute for official appraisal, and told this paper it was "not in a position to comment on the founding of an association." Within the administration, some take a different view. "If filings through the association take hold, it does deter leakage to the black market," one official said. "Approving something and counting it are two different things." The TDA's budget request for next year includes funding for a system to make appraisal waiting times visible.

At the card exchange afterward, operators queued with leather bags fitted with listening plates in the base, used to pick up echoes through the wall of a container. It is nothing beside the center's non-destructive testing, but it can tell whether something inside moves. What is in the bag differs by operator: a magnetometer for one, an infrared thermometer for temperature differentials for another. Tsuyuki's holds a wooden backing plate he has used since his assistant days. "To hear anything, your own hands must be quiet first. This is the tool for practicing that."

"The tools are ours; the trust comes later," one operator in his thirties laughed. "Everyone knows you're finished if you open it. Though it may be truer to say we eat because we didn't."

Clients speak too. A woman, 37, in the eastern ward asked for a survey last year on a metal box found in her late father's house. "For four months I was frightened of it being in the house. Just being told, without opening it, 'it's probably empty' let me sleep again. Whether that's correct, I still don't know."

The association set dues at 30,000 yen a year and adopted an expulsion rule for members who breach the three principles. There is no third-party audit, and the record format has yet to be written. At least 150 preliminary survey operators are believed to be working in the capital, so membership does not reach a third. "I won't speak badly of the ones who stayed out," Tsuyuki added at the close. "But a roster means a name can be struck from it. Even that is worth something."