estate agents
Death by a thousand cuts – legislation is killing the letting agent
There is an unforeseen cumulative effect of the raft of new legislation, says Adam Walker, and it is pushing the independent out of the PRS. We have completed a much higher than usual number of business sales this month due to people rushing to beat the latest tax increase in the Spring Budget. However there…
Read MoreWe Must Give Our Young People A Chance
A friend recently asked me to give his son some advice about a career in an estate agency. I did my best to help him but in the process of doing so I realised that it would be almost impossible for him to do what I did when I started. I took my first estate…
Read MoreThe End Of The Family Owned Business?
A great deal has been written about how changes to CGT in the last budget will prevent farmers from handing their farm down to their sons and daughter. However this change to tax laws will also prevent people from handing down other businesses to their families like estate agencies and this has hardly been covered…
Read MoreThe Impact Of N.I. On Letting Agents
There have been a lot of articles about the impact of the recent National Insurance increases on pubs, shops and the big supermarkets. However, no-one yet has a written about the impact on estate agents and letting agents and the impact will be quite serious. Let’s look at the impact on a small letting agent…
Read MoreWhen 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 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 MoreWhy You Need Cyber Insurance
Almost every day I read a story about an organization that has been the victim of a cyber-attack. One of the UKs largest conveyancing solicitors suffered such a devastating attack last year that it virtually closed down their business for many weeks. One of the London boroughs was unable to provide property search information to…
Read MoreThe ULEZ Threat
I keep reading articles about the desperate shortage of rental accommodation in London and the spiralling rents. This is of course caused by the usual issues. Increased mortgage costs for landlords, new compliance legislation, savage fines for minor breaches of the compliance rules, the ending of Section 21 and the huge cost of complying with…
Read MoreThe Impact of Higher Interest Rates
Interest rates are now at their highest rate for 15 years and the whole country is reeling from the impact. So far, letting agents have been relatively unaffected. Some landlords are leaving the sector because they cannot afford the increase in their mortgage payments but increased rents have more than compensated for the lost fee…
Read MoreWhose Side Is Your Agent On?
A few years ago we saw a spate of estate agencies charging fees to their buyers rather than to their sellers. They were able to win instructions by offering to sell houses free of charge but of course this wasn’t really true because the buyers would simply deduct the agent’s fee from the price that…
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