When Will The Value Of A Sales Business Recover?
The week after the Brexit referendum vote I lost every single business sale in my pipeline. It was heartbreaking, months and months of work all came to absolutely nothing. However after 32 years of selling businesses I have come to realise that these roller coaster ups and downs are all part of the job. The…
Read MoreWhy You Must Take Compliance Seriously
Almost every week we read about another letting agent who has had to pay an enormous fine for a compliance mistake but if my experience is anything to go by a great many letting agents are still making elementary compliance mistakes. So what are the most common problems that I am seeing? The first is…
Read MoreRecruitment Mistakes To Become Illegal
I will never forget my first day in estate agency 44 years ago. I had been recruited by the branch manager and I had never met the senior partner before I started my job. I was very young and very keen so I arrived at my office half an hour before it opened in order…
Read MoreThe Right To Switch Off
The Right To Switch Off
Read MoreWhat Will Labour Do To CGT?
There have been a number of articles in the press recently that suggest that Labour might align CGT rates with income tax rates. This would have a catastrophic impact on landlords who wish to dispose of an investment property or business owners who wish to retire. At the moment a higher rate tax payer who…
Read MoreHow Will AI Affect Estate Agency?
Hardly a day goes by without another article about how AI will affect our lives but how will it affect the property sector? In the long term no-one really knows of course but in the short and medium term we are already seeing clues about its likely impact. The first thing it will do is…
Read MoreWhat Would A Labour Government Mean For Letting Agents?
It now seems almost certain that we will elect a Labour government on 4th July. So, what will this mean for letting agents? Well, this depends on the size of their victory and the type of Labour government that we get. If the election is a landslide our new government will have much more confidence…
Read MoreThe Commercial Lending Crisis
My last article was about how the high street banks are failing to provide an acceptable level of service to their current account holders. However, their is a bigger problem still with the banks and that is that they are no longer prepared to lend money to business owners on acceptable terms. Until a few…
Read MoreWhat Are Banks For?
Almost everyone has a story to tell about their bank and very few of their stories are positive ones. It didn’t used to be this way. I remember clearly the day that I opened my first bank account. I was 12 years old and my father took me to open a child account at the…
Read MoreAre you ready for Labour’s Tax bombs?
When I started work in 1979 , the top rate of tax was 98%: 83% income tax plus a 15% surcharge on investment income. If you don’t believe me then Google it! I wasn’t earning enough in those early days to pay this tax rate myself but my boss was and he seemed to spend…
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