NEW president of commercial property association Sapoa Lynette Finlay, CEO of property management firm Finlay & Associates, says her top priority during her tenure will be the property charter expected to be put in place by next year.

Finlay, who was elected Sapoa's first woman president at the organisation's annual convention at the Cape Town International Convention Centre last week, says the property charter is going to be a "major task" because everybody within Sapoa needs to be included in the process.

She says that Sapoa will also be focusing on education and seeing how it can improve that in a way that is linked to skills development within the property charter.

Finlay believes that a positive way to ensure meaningful black economic empowerment is through a process of developing a "balanced scorecard" where companies would be rated according to skills development, procurement, management participation, investment in empowerment companies and "not only shareholdings".

"I want to stress the fact that the property charter is designed to grow the industry. We will be looking at key risk factors likely to affect the industry and develop a framework to overcome these issues on a longterm sustainable basis."

Finlay says another top priority for Sapoa in the year ahead is to establish property industry guidelines. "We are going to do a lot of research on activities relating to the property industry and from this set performance and fee guidelines."

On the question of the performance of property companies she says they will be looking at facilities and asset management and establishing guidelines on what are the best services to expect and the fees linked to them.

May 19 2004 07:38:21:000AM Nick Wilson Business Day 1st Edition