Search results for: lockdown
What Will Be The Long-term Impact Of COVID On The Housing Market?
Now that the Negotiator magazine is back in print again, I must write my monthly article a couple of weeks before it is published. This makes me a little nervous about covering fast-moving topics but this month I am going to make an exception because this article is too important to delay. After two years…
Read MoreAre Estate Agents Undervalued?
House prices go up and down all the time but usually the fluctuations are quite gentle. In most years, the change is just a few percent up or down. A boom such as we are having right now means a 10% rise and a crash such as the one that followed the 2008/2009 financial crisis…
Read MoreThe Next Financial Scandal
The success of the vaccine has so far exceeded the scientists’ most optimistic predictions. After a truly frightening and miserable year, we are at last seeing infection rates coming down and we can start to dream about life returning to normal. The government deserves to be congratulated for the part that they have played in…
Read MoreThe End Of Let-only Contracts?
It is commonly accepted that the property market has survived Covid-19 well but this is not entirely true. The truth is that some sectors of the market have done very much better than others. Residential sales agents have been to hell and back. When the first lockdown was announced last spring, many agents felt that…
Read MoreLaughter is the Best Medicine
The pandemic has affected different people in very different ways. Sectors such as hospitality have been hit incredibly hard and many thousands of people have lost everything they own through no fault of their own. Other sectors including estate agents, letting agents and indeed business transfer agents have continued to trade very well and those…
Read MoreThe housing market is crucial to the economy
The national papers and the trade press have been full of articles recently about whether estate agents should still be allowed to stay open during the lockdown. I am firmly of the opinion that they should but with restrictions. The housing market is of huge importance to the economy. The total revenue earned by estate…
Read MoreWhat Will Happen to the Market in 2021?
People ask me how I think the housing market will be next year about twenty times a day at the moment so I’m going to break the habit of a lifetime and answer the question. So, here we go. I think the market in 2021 will be similar to the market that we had in…
Read MoreOh for some certainty
At this time of year I am usually busy helping my consultancy clients to prepare their financial targets for next year. But at the moment there is so much uncertainty that this is almost impossible to do. On the lettings side, good managed letting businesses have hardly been affected by the pandemic at all so…
Read MoreSurviving the Virus
This will be my last article about surviving Covid-19 and I have saved the most important topic for last. That topic is the importance of strong leadership. For many years, I devoted a section of my management training course to the importance of good leadership. I started the topic with a syndicate exercise. I asked…
Read MoreSurviving COVID-19 – Changing Your Employment Practices
One of the most important factors that separates the best estate agency and letting agents from the rest is the quality of their staff. Until now employers have competed to recruit the best staff by offering higher salaries, better cars and better promotion prospects but COVID-19 has changed all this because a huge percentage of…
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