FACT FILE

In the last week before the budget we completed on the sale of more businesses than we usually complete in six months.  The sales that have been reported are just the tip of the iceberg as many buyers prefer not to make announcements and other sales were between business partners. Why the rush?  Well, business owners were…

It seems that almost every time another one of our business sales is announced, there is a cacophony of comments on the trade portals about why big businesses are bad and small businesses are good. On the residential sales side, this may actually be true. There are still a lot of independently owned residential sales…

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…

Several of our big business sales have been announced over the last few weeks and the trolls have been busy slagging off the buyers. Their view is that the buyers have paid far too much money for what they have bought and that they will never get it back because the landlords will all leave…

My marketing agency recently asked me to write to all of our clients to ask them why they had chosen to sell their business at this time. I found their replies to be very surprising. In fact, I found them to be quite disturbing. The main reason that people want to sell their business at…

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…

Several of our big business sales have been announced over the last few weeks and the trolls have been busy slagging off the buyers. Their view is that the buyers have paid far too much money for what they have bought and that they will never get it back because the landlords will all leave…

The government has spent £300 billion so far trying to fight Covid-19 and there is no doubt that at some point in the near future, they will need to raise taxes in order to balance the books. The Conservative Government made manifesto commitments not to raise income tax, national insurance or VAT and they will…

Agents spend their whole careers telling vendors and landlords why they will be able to achieve a better sale price or a higher rent than they could achieve themselves. Then, at the end of their career, they try to sell their own business. I am constantly amazed by this and during the twenty-five years that…

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…