Tuesday 23 March 2010

Join the Silver Surfers....!


According to the BBC It has been a tough couple of years for people trying to earn a living in the property market.

The slump in home sales that followed the onset of the credit crunch and the recession led to widespread job cuts among house building firms and saw thousands of estate agency branches closing down.

With lenders restricting their funds, and in some cases ceasing lending at all, people like mortgage brokers, solicitors and removal firms have all suffered.

But with the housing market picking up, albeit gently, new types of businesses are hoping to take advantage of some opportunities.

Inevitably these days, the internet has a lot to do with it.

Simon Gerrard is the managing director of Martyn Gerrard, a traditional estate agency chain in North London which has been going for just over 45 years.

Business is good again and he says prices in his neck of the woods, stretching from Kentish Town to Whetstone, are now back to their previous heights of 2007.

This January was the best January in the firm's history, despite the freezing weather, and in the first two months of the year 75 sales were tied up - much more than the 43 in the same two months last year.

But some traditional selling methods have gone for good. Simon has just paid for his firm's last batch of adverts in his local papers.

From now on, his advertising will be restricted to his own firm's website and those of the big property portals.

"It is a sea of change, 20 years ago we spent an absolute fortune on the local press," he says. "In the last two months we have pulled our last bits of advertising out of the local press because it is a luxury." "The local press is not where you look - you look on the internet and that is where we advertise."

Online estate agency is dominated by traditional firms using either their own websites or the property portals, such as Rightmove and Findaproperty, which in turn choose to deal with the traditional estate agents only.

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) said recently that the transaction costs of buying and selling homes would be cut if more businesses were prepared to set up as pure online estate agents, or were prepared to help individuals sell their homes without an agent at all.

Seems like the guys at Moray Property may be on to something, offering the best of both worlds, with their fixed / capped fees and Internet advertising.

Though there are a few of us who also still look in the local press, but our numbers are getting fewer and fewer - It's mainly the older generation too, time they became Silver Surfers, embraced new technology and secured a new house to boot !

Until the next time,

Mr Jackson.