Researcher revamps agribusiness team

Property Investment Research (PIR) has revamped its agribusiness research team after ditching its previous joint venture with independent researcher Tim Bennett.

The new research team will be more aligned with the style of PIR’s property research capability, which relies on using specialists to produce different sector reports.

PIR business development manager John Nicoll said the agribusiness team will be headed by former Adviser Edge senior researcher Dugald Higgins.

Higgins will co-ordinate the research team, with PIR technical adviser Dr Ian Hopkins overseeing the report writing. Specialist consultant researchers will look at the specific areas of agribusiness and the compliance of schemes will be reviewed by Compliance and Risk services director Murray Jones.

Nicoll said the change is part of PIR’s commitment to researching the agribusiness sector, despite it being a crowded market; there are four houses providing research on this specialist area.

“We are looking to be more pro-active in the sector despite relaunching late in this year’s selling season,” he said.

“But we now see this as putting the changes in place for next year.”

PIR is writing six reports on projects for this financial year, however, it has lost the Timbercorp business for this year.

“We will be looking at doing a full sector review next year and providing individual reports on schemes,” Nicoll said.

“We are looking at restructuring our reports and we are talking to advisers about what they want from the reports and how to improve them.”

All agribusiness reports will be on-line and the PIR website will be providing articles on current agribusiness topics.

“We see agribusiness as complementary to our property research and how we research that sector,” he said.

“We are looking at agribusiness as long-term, despite it being a saturated market in research.”