THE Society of Chartered surveyors (SCS) has engaged a professional fundraiser as guest speaker for its last hurrah next Thursday night. The final annual dinner – it has been running since 1895 – is likely to be a sellout event in Dublin’s Burlington Hotel before the surveyors formally merge with the Irish Auctioneers Valuers Institute (IAVI)

The after-dinner speaker will be former Trinity graduate Kingsley Aikins, who heads up Worldwide Ireland Funds. The surveyors will be heartened to discover that Aikins’s organisation has helped to pump over $300 million into Ireland in recent years. The Dublin-born businessman will undoubtedly be encouraged to keep going as overseas funding is now needed more than ever. Before joining the Ireland Fund he represented the IDA and CTT in Sydney.

Behind the scenes the presidents of the SCS and the IAVI (Peter Stapleton and Kirsten Mehl) are completing arrangements for the amalgamation of the two organisations in the coming months. The new body, to be known as the Society of Chartered Surveyors of Ireland will move into the IAVI’s Georgian HQ on Merrion Square. The much smaller SCS Georgian office at Wilton Place – likely to be worth close to €2m – will probably either be sold or leased, depending on the strength of the market at the time. The merger comes at a time when both the property and construction industries have been decimated by the bursting of the property bubble and the crisis in the banking sector.

Things can only get better.