This article is a typical example of a badly informed journo' jumping on the bandwagon, in an effort to reinforce the level of public misinformation concerning Estate Agents. The vast majority of agents are, like ourselves, hardworking and acting in the interests of their clients. We have been in business for almost 25 years, have dealt with thousands of clients and have received no complaints of any kind during this time. On the contrary, we have countles letters of thanks and appreciation.
The journalist, whose industry is, anyway, far from lily white, should try to take an unbiased view and not merely echo the misguided comments of his fellows and those with a vested interest in alternative sales methods.

This of course was a very well crafted PRESS RELEASE advertising the launch of a new property website, masquerading as a 'survey'. You can tell any story you like with statistics if you crop the results appropriately and use only those figures that suit your point of view. You only need to look at the endless self-serving 'press releases' of the mortgage and building society brigade talking up the market for their own ends.

The truth of the matter is that love em or loath em, people will ALWAYS prefer to pay someone else to do the work, given the money and hence estate agents can rest easy that online property services won't put them out of a job anytime soon.

The reality is that estate agents themselves are putting agents out of business - there are simply too many of them fighting over not enough properties and only those that are prepared to raise their game and offer genuinely good professional service and consider their customer's interests over their own, will prosper in the long term.

The useless agents (and this includes some of the biggest names) tend to be the ones that want to blame online property services for taking away their cosy existence. Really, it's just laziness - agents prefer not to change or give up what they regard as being their exclusive right to earn large sums of money for not much effort. However, the internet, like the telephone, is just a tool. It doesn't give a bad business an advantage - good property services using the internet to best effect (of which there probably are only a few) are merely offering those that want to move away from agents the choice they need.

Agents need to stop bleating about competition and get up and do something about improving their own offering.

The American experience is a case in point - they are better regulated, better trained and more professional than UK agents, they charge much higher commissions (7-9% being the norm), share (or multi-list) business between agencies and are more highly respected by US homeowners than agents are in the UK.

Nevertheless, selling privately still offers a choice in the US where it sits at roughly 15% of total house volumes sold each year - in the UK the figure is probably around 5% at present, but this is likely to follow the American path as with most things, which could see as many as 150,000 homes a year sold privately in the UK netting homeowners some £450m savings in commission charges.

That still leaves 85% of the market in the hands of UK estate agents in the future, which, if they can just offer greater attention to customer's needs, should do most of the better agents very nicely thank you.