José Covas FRICS

José Covas FRICS is a Portuguese real estate valuation and investment professional with close to three decades of experience, and the first Portuguese to help shape the standards by which property is valued worldwide.

He is Chair of the RICS Standards Committee, the body that provides assurance that RICS professional standards are of high quality, capable of being regulated, and consistent with the public interest. Since April 2023 he has served on the Standards Review Board of the International Valuation Standards Council, the first Portuguese professional appointed to it, and since 2025 he has chaired the Council’s ESG/Sustainability Working Group — work concerned with how sustainability factors are reflected in valuation evidence, risk and value, rather than treated as a presumed premium.

He began his career at Colliers International in 1997, becoming Director of Valuation and Consultancy in Portugal during the period in which the modern Portuguese commercial property market took shape. He joined DTZ, later part of Cushman & Wakefield, in 2005 as head of valuation and advisory for Portugal and Spain, and in 2008 moved to WORX/Knight Frank as Head of Advisory, Research and Valuations, with additional responsibility for Angola and Mozambique. He founded his own advisory practice in 2014, now José Covas Real Estate, a RICS-regulated firm in Lisbon, and was Managing Partner of Aura REE Portugal until 2023.

A member of RICS since 2007 and a Fellow of the Institution, he chaired the Portuguese Valuation Group, served on the RICS Portugal board, and chaired RICS Portugal from 2020 to 2025, a period in which he engaged directly with the CMVM, the Banco de Portugal and government on the regulation of valuation. He is a RICS Registered Valuer and an accredited evaluative mediator in land, property and construction disputes.

He is an economist by training, holding a degree from ISEG – Lisbon School of Economics and Management and an executive master’s in real estate finance and management from ISCTE. He teaches valuation and professional ethics on postgraduate and executive programmes at ISEG, Universidade Católica Portuguesa and INDEG-ISCTE.

His professional position is consistent across three decades of practice, teaching and standards work: value is not a number but a judgement, and a judgement is only worth what it can withstand when it is tested.