Foxtons made headlines for all the wrong reasons again this week over the allegation that a negotiator refused to show a property without the applicant taking mortgage advice from Alexander Hall; Foxtons' mortgage advisors first.
Farcical as the whole episode is, it is indicative of the fragility of the 'green shoots' of recovery. Activity levels are up, there is no doubt about that, but how much of this activity will actually result in completions?
Rightmove's latest survey has shown that consumer confidence has increased dramatically since the beginning of the year, but it seems likely that the basis of this confidence is driven much more by desire and hope than by understanding.
It remains highly debatable whether the banks will value properties at anywhere near the price that buyers agree to. It also remains horrendously difficult for the vast majority to obtain a mortgage at a decent rate, if at all. An article in The Times today suggests that lending criteria has the potential to get even tighter because of European directives introduced last year.
Consequently, there may be some busy negotiators inclined to feel the same way as the Foxtons chap, dismissing those who they're not sure are good for the money or the mortgage.
If your resources are stretched and stock is still limited, it is of course vital to ensure your team are qualifying applicants diligently and professionally. But remind them that you only ever sell to a small percentage of applicants and that percentage has more to do with market share than market conditions.
There is a will again, we just need to help find a way.
0% commission. It's a tried and tested tactic that has been used to establish a presence in new markets. Many reassuringly expensive agents saw their market share severely dented when an audacious out of towner started doing the job for free in recent years.
Now a fresh assault on the reassuringly expensive agent seems to be afoot as Channel 4 Presenter, Sarah Beeny has launched a new self sale portal called Tepilo.com. She hasn't laid out on branded Mini's or cappucino machines, but Tepilo has adopted the 0% model in an attempt to tempt sellers away from the services of Estate Agents. It is completely free to list a property on Tepilo.com and the site offers the facilities to pretty much handle the whole selling process. Presumably, Tepilo's business plan is to earn commissions on all the services that you would expect an agent to refer usually. For example, the site will, very diligently, not allow you to list a property without a HIP and if you don't have one already they direct you to myhiphome.co.uk; a site which bears a striking resemblance (bar a few quid) to hipilo.co.uk.
This is by no means the first FSBO (For Sale By Owner) service to launch in the UK, (remember Tescopropertymarket.com?) but is there any reason why this one should succeed where others have failed? To succeed, they need traffic, but portal traffic is built on one singularly important factor; choice.
Forget presentation, forget features or technologies, the buyer wants
choice and for that reason you have to have everything that's on the
market. Tepilo may attract a lot of listings, but a lot just doesn't cut it. Tescopropertymarket understood this and tried to cheat it's way
to glory. They failed. Although Tepilo's property price info is supplied by Zoopla, I can't
imagine any of the portals would dare bite the hand that feeds them by
listing properties from Tepilo or vice versa.
Even in a recession though, fortune favours the brave and somebody even bigger than Tesco could upset the applecart and give Tepilo a big helping hand. If Google rock up with their real estate search in the UK in the next few months, Tepilo will have it's chance to shine. Google won't make it's property listings as fully featured as Rightmove's or Primelocation's, it doesn't need to. Globrix and Nestoria have laid the foundations for property to be found through a search engine and then presented through an agents own website already. Tepilo can feed a search engine in the same way an agent's website would. This interdependency is critical; If you want to see the 10 or 15% of the market which is FSBO properties, you have to go to Tepilo, if you want to see the other 85 or 90% of the market, you go to Rightmove et al. But if you want to see everything, you go to Google. Not instead of, but beforehand.
It is an interesting irony that someone who has built a career on chronicling the misadventures of the 'average' homeseller, should now decide to facilitate what will no doubt be a comedy of errors for some. A few of the sellers that have already listed on the site have made a real hash of presenting their properties (here's my favourite thus far). Perhaps Tepilo will provide Channel 4 with an almost limitless supply of property selling horror stories, perhaps it will be another short-lived FSBO folly or perhaps (only with help from the aforementioned) it will finally provide the UK with a viable self sale solution. Interesting times...
Google Maps have rolled out a new and improved search function for property. The new functionality went live in Australia and the US yesterday, but will display UK properties if you search accordingly via the introductory page here (try "Epsom" if your location has a namesake elsewhere).
The fact that it is all labelled "Real Estate" is one indication that Google is not quite ready for the UK property market yet, but it won't take them long if it proves successful (i.e; generates PPC revenue) Down Under and Stateside.
Google have dabbled with property listings since introducing Google Base in 2006. With next generation portals like Globrix having proved the concept of generating traffic and in turn revenue from property search and agents websites now geared to providing direct links to listings, it is actually quite surprising that they hadn't upped their game in this area before now.
However, despite the familiarity of the Google Maps interface, the user experience and functionality of the new property search is actually quite inferior to what others have done to provide map based search facilities. Thinkproperty and Nestoria still set the benchmark in this area and despite Google's inclusion of Streetview with results, it lacks their usual 'wow' factor.
This may be of little consequence if Google's index of properties proves to be vast enough and tidy enough. To have every listing (the golden chalice of portaldom) is probably quite achievable for Google and the look and feel often plays second fiddle to depth of content in the world of classified listings (think Craigslist and Gumtree).
The UK portals will undoubtedly watch Google's development in this area pensively. It has just as much potential to help as to hurt them. For agents, it is yet another reason to improve your listings on your own site.
As the term 'green shoots' becomes as ubiquitous in the press now as the term 'credit crunch' was a year ago, the housebuilder, Miller Homes, has decided to step up its marketing activity by producing its first ever television ad entitled "The Optimist".
The ad promotes the company's shared ownership scheme and although the proposition is nothing new or unique in itself, the execution is a cut above previous attempts by housebuilders to market themselves on television.
In announcing the advert, the company's blog stated "Now is the time for optimism and confidence in the UK property market
and what better way to demonstrate this than by putting our money where
our mouth is with the launch of our first ever TV campaign."
Ignoring the folly of launching this campaign on the brink of silly season in a marketing medium that is in terminal decline, one has to commend Miller for their bravery. Until marketers start talking positively about the property market again, how can we expect the public to do so?
The role of social media and networking sites in keeping the world
informed of events in Iran has been enormous in the last couple of weeks.
Iranians have used YouTube to show the world what the authorities there
have prevented foreign journalists from filming. Twitter has been alive
with tales from inside the country and messages of support from outside
of it. Amongst all of this important and worthy activity though has
emerged a story that has caused a PR disaster for a furniture store
which has little or nothing to do with Iran...
Habitat decided last week that the Twitterverse was a good place to
bolster it's database of customers, presumably so they could send
conventional marketing materials to that database. The mortal sin that
Habitat committed though was to include the top hashtags - the terms
that are being most talked about on Twitter at any given time in it's
posts. Including these hashtags meant that Habitat's messages were
exposed to Twitter users (who were actually seeking Tweets about Iran)
much more than they would have been normally. This is not a new
practice on Twitter and it is recognised as a form of spam by many, but
it is not a practice that you expect to see from an established and
reputable high street brand.
Unfortunately for Habitat, their decision to use important world events
as a way of bolstering their database was a decidedly stupid one which
has quickly provoked criticism from the Twitter community, this in turn
caused the blogging community to condemn their actions and soon after
this, the broadcast media and national newspapers joined the chorus of
disapproval.
Habitat's formal and vague apology for this transgression only goes to
show that this is a company who have no proper understanding of social media and the differences it has to
conventional media. Many companies are making a dash to get their products, services and brands onto Facebook, Twitter and the rest, but if they fail to understand the fundamentals; join the conversation, focus on relationships not key messages, then it can seriously backfire. The ability to post amusing photos on Facebook of the office Christmas party does not qualify one of your junior staff to manage your brand in the social media landscape.
The most recognised awards in the industry have just got better as they are now brought to you in association with The Sunday Times. Winners will be able to display their medals, complete with The Sunday Times branding, on all marketing materials. The Sunday Times is the most widely circulated Sunday broadsheet, so winners can guarantee that consumer awareness of the Estate Agency of the Year Awards will be unrivalled by any other industry awards. Now in their sixth year, these are still the only awards judged by an independent panel of industry experts overseen by the Ombudsman.
There are a number of specialist categories plus regional awards for small and medium sized estate agencies giving you a chance of regional as well as national success. With the entire industry having been through the most difficult period for 20 years, we've worked hard to ensure that our awards remain head and shoulders above the rest in terms of the value for the winners and have also reduced the entry price to just £149 (+VAT) per category. When you consider the value of an award in association with The Sunday Times can you afford not to enter the Estate Agency of the Year Awards 2009?
Full details of categories and entry forms are available at www.estateagencyevents.com or by phone 01372 370837.
When I've told people about the launch of the new Academy site, and how it's free for everyone to access, the two questions I'm asked are "How and Why?" Let's deal with the "Why?" first.
The property industry has been hit harder than any other and whilst governments around the world are bailing out banks, insurance companies, car manufacturers and other large scale employers they've done nothing for estate agents. Thousands have lost their jobs, owners have stopped drawing salaries, investment for the future has been cut to zero. So we asked ourselves the questions "what can we do to help the industry? And the answer - provide the best training in the industry free of charge.
But how can we do this?
I recently read "What would Google do?" by Jeff Jarvis where he poses this question for several business sectors (including real estate by the way) and concluded that the ways of funding a business and making a profit have changed since the times BG (Before Google). Suitably inspired, we decided to build an inclusive training platform and invited all the very best trainers to participate - Adam Walker, Richard Rawlings, Clare Fletcher, Julian O'Dell, Mark Hayward, Peter Chapman all agreed to share their wisdom, experience. I hope you will visit each of their web sites and see how they can help your business develop further as whilst online training is very cost effective it doesn't completely replace the live workshops.
Developing the Academy has required a substantial investment and the ongoing cost of maintaining the site itself is considerable. In what some have described as "a leap of faith", we're confident that the site will attract a large and motivated audience who in turn will wish to learn more about appropriate products and services which will improve their business performance.
In addition to the video lessons we will be frequently posting articles of interest together with surveys, analysis and comment on topical issues. You can access all this for free and stay up to date by registering your email on the site and by following and linking to this blog.
Please give us your feedback, suggestions and ideas - all will be carefully considered - and if you would like to make a contribution, as other leading agents such as Peter Rollings, John McGrath, Julie Twist, Jon Handford, Alan Robinson and many others have then please get in touch.
My hope is that The Academy helps you and your team to get through this difficult time and then to really prosper in the future. Thank you for your support.
