A graduate of Edinburgh University, Derek qualified as a Chartered Surveyor in 1984 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) in 1993. He gained a post-graduate Diploma in Arbitration from the College of Estate Management and, via examination, became a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators in 1996 and the National Association of Estate Agents in 2004. He has an LLM from Northumbria University in Advanced Property Law specialising in landlord and tenant and service charge matters. Derek commenced his surveying career in Scotland in the District Valuer’s Office spending much time abroad in Shetland. Subsequently he worked for Prudential and as a partner in a regional firm of Chartered Surveyors in south England. He then took on the position of Associate Professor in Real Estate at Kingston University and has spent some time at the University of Westminster where he was responsible for business development in real estate external programmes. 

Throughout his career he has dealt with a wide range of property from residential to commercial real estate, forestry and agricultural interests to valuing fishing and seabed rights, mast sites, open cast mines and schools. He regularly sits as an assessor of those seeking chartered status and is an external examiner to two national professional societies. He has recently been made an Honoured Fellow of the National Association of Estate Agents. He also presents training programmes for a number of major international surveying practices in the UK and at other international destinations including Bahrain, the Bahamas, Russia, Europe and Scotland. In October 2014, he was made an Honoured Fellow of the National Association of Estate Agents (NAEA) for services to property education.