An odd time to launch an estate agency, you might think, but Simplyzigzag ("The People's Estate Agent") is a new and ambitious name combining DIY homesales with an online estate agency model. So which is it? Is it a DIY sales site or an estate agency? You decide. For £50, you get a three-month listing with five images, plus password protected access. For £500, Simplyzigzag act as a full agent, handling enquiries, organising viewings, and - most importantly - earning access to a number of portals that cater to agents-only, including Rightmove and PropertyFinder. For £1,500, your property's featured on the homepage, you get a dedicated account manager who'll oversee the entire process, from offer to closure, to liaising with the solicitor. Like other flat-fee agencies, they point out the money to be saved over the more conventional commission model. It's perhaps a more convincing argument at a time when property's selling easily. Right now, no-sale-no-fee might be more attractive than a £1,500 speculative punt. But £500 to put a property on Rightmove and PropertyFinder seems like a decent deal.
Estate agents aren't sleeping, according to a survey commissioned by Travelodge. They're apparently the most sleep-deprived British workers, managing just 5 hours and 50 minutes of shut-eye every night. Lorry and taxi drivers are next, with 6 hours and 16 minutes, followed by bankers with 6 hours and 23 minutes. The neat connection between these results and the credit crunch and fuel price crises made me - for a moment - doubt the veracity of the results. And I became more cynical after the claim that media professionals are sleeping the sleep of the just, with a survey-topping 7 hours and 12 minutes. Err... what about the parties? Presumably that's counting daytime desk-naps, too.
It's a ninth consecutive fall according to Hometrack, of 1%, leaving house prices 3.2% down on the year, and 2.5% since the start of the year. Weeks spent showing houses before an offer... 10.3 weeks (last June, the figure was 6), new buyer registrations... down 5.7%, and now less than 50% of August 2007 levels.
The figures are for May, and they show no change nationally, but a 0.8% rise in London. That leaves the annual growth at just 1.8% nationally, 6.9% in London. Remember, these are based on completion figures (so, on the one hand, they're accurate; on the other, they represent deals done weeks earlier), so we're either looking at the very early stages of a significant house price crash, or something more like the house-price-stagnation-combined-with-general-inflation model that might, in the long run, be the healthiest thing for the housing market.
Oh, and here's Reuters, showing how not to report house price indices (lucky they're not tradable stocks)
As you're probably aware, traffic costs, and right here is where the Rat and Mouse continues paying. Which is why we're encouraging advertisers who feel they might have something to gain from seeing their brand served up to homeowners, renters, landlords, movers, media shakers on around 4,000 pages a day. As part of the deal, you'll get a heartfelt thank you each and every week, which is why, tonight, we're saying thanks to...
... LandlordNanny, an innovative, hi-tech, but simple-to-use, drag-and-drop online organiser for everything a landlord needs to remember, whether managing a single property or a giant portfolio. As well as providing a useful directory of recommended letting-sector professionals (accountants, mortgage providers, HIPs providers etc), they're a registered letting agent, which means that customers get to advertise properties on the large property portals, including Primelocation.com and Propertyfinder.com. Use of the basic service is free. Upgrade to a premium account (£99.95, but £49.95 during the current introductory offer) and you get access to legal documents, automated invoicing, web-based accounting software and more. In other words, the kind of things that would cost a great deal more than £99.95 if you handed them over to a lettings agent.
"Some have suggested that this [premium] may run to hundreds of thousands, depending on the property. It would be interesting to speculate on what we could do at the school if all of these families, and the building developers, returned the favour by donating, say, five per cent of the value the school has added to their houses."
Tony Benn MP has put his weight behind a campaign to stop Kensington & Chelsea council selling off Holland Park School's playing fields to developers (who plan, apparently, to knock up a bit of luxury housing). The school's being rebuilt, and the council's looking to raise cash. Benn - who sent his own children to the school, and whose wife was chair of the governors - clearly has an emotional attachment to the institution.... the first purpose-built comprehensive in London. More here.
My favourite Private Eye cartoon of recent weeks shows a woman reading a newspaper at the breakfast table. It has a headline is about falling house prices. 'I can’t believe', she says, 'that just last week we were worrying about global warming'. Soon, we’ll begin to see whether the green domestic revolution – windmills on houses, low-energy kettles – has the resilience to withstand new and chillier economic winds; or whether it was an aspect of the good times… a way for a consumer generation, which has learnt to express itself by buying things, to show appreciation for effortlessly increasing property wealth, and give something back.
Our publisher, and his guest column, for Citywire.
This has just arrived in our "comments" section. We can't publish the name of the agency at this stage...
Just heard through the grapevine that [a major high street estate agency] have been refused credit to lease new office equipment. They even couldn't get it agreed using backstreet lenders! Is this the start of things to come, no assets, huge debts and no income?
More - subject to the advice of our fifth floor legal department - later.
So what do you do when your boss "lets you go"? Accept that these are rough times for the sector, ask for a reference and seek employment with another estate agent? Perhaps leverage your experience to set up on your own... maybe online? Or perhaps you and a fellow employee invite your boss around to your home, tie him up, give him a sedative, stand on his head for a bit, pistol-whip him, threaten to execute his 13-year-old son if he doesn't give you £200,000, and finally phone his wife and accuse him of sexually assaulting you? Ambreen Gul, formerly of Sky Lord Properties in Ilford, apparently chose option three, in what sounds like a particularly nasty, violent and (considering the whole thing took place in her own home) stupid revenge attack. Waqas Malik, the victim, had hired her, fired her, so - although it seems unlikely at this point that he'd put her through a Myers-Briggs - he must have had some sense of her character. So what persuaded him to turn up to her flat? What do you think?
Gul had managed to entice her former boss - who spent four days in hospital after the ordeal - to her flat by pretending to be interested in... selling her home to him.
Apparently, there's this thing, where somebody sells a house to somebody else who buys it. Used to happen a lot. Here's one for sale. It's a three-bedroom end-of-row on Portobello Road, and it comes complete with a gallery space on the ground and lower ground floors. The space could be rented out, kept, or even converted. But the house is more interesting than that. Designed by Meadowcroft Griffin in 2004, it won a Conservation Commendation at the 2006 RIBAs, and it's bold inside and out, with the "good light" distributed throughout, rather than reserved for the gallery spaces. It's with The Modern House Estate Agents, with a guide price of £2.25m.
... with their incessant building and bragging and odd-smelling organic cheeses and expensive handbags. Except mainly the building. According to today's Times, the City of London, guardians of the Heath, are warning that the character and peace of the place is under threat from a spate of extensions and home improvements which will loom over the capital's favourite parkland, and offer the toffs uninterrupted views of ladies bathing in the ladies' pond and men coupling in the bushes. More here.
According to this, Rachel Weisz has just bought in London, picking up a £3.5m house in Primrose Hill; and Reese Witherspoon is in Notting Hill, staying with Jake Gyllenhaal, who's currently filming here. There's still time for Hollywood to save the London property market.
First, an astonishing claim in Sunday's Observer, that Jon Hunt might be considering buying back in. He sold Foxtons for £390m at just the right time. Now there's entirely unconfirmed chatter on the subject of him getting a foot back in the door cheap in order to help it meet its loan commitments.
In related - but different - news, the Rat and Mouse has had a number of emails from people claiming to be the driver of the Foxtons Mini filmed off-roading here. Obviously I wouldn't want to cast aspersions on the integrity of my readership... but there wouldn't be room in that car for all the people who've emailed. I demand proof. Would the real Foxtons rally driver please step forward?
They dropped by 1.2% in June (1.4% in London). Miles Shipside:
For most sellers that will mean whatever they thought of asking for their property at the peak of the boom, they need to take at least 10% off. Otherwise their property will stagnate.
Eagle-eyed Rat and Mouse readers might have spotted our brand new advertiser. They're called LandlordNanny, and they're an innovative, hi-tech, but simple-to-use, drag-and-drop online organiser for everything a landlord needs to remember, whether managing a single property or a giant portfolio. As well as providing a useful directory of recommended letting-sector professionals (accountants, mortgage providers, HIPs providers etc), they're a registered letting agent, which means that customers get to advertise properties on the large property portals, including Primelocation.com and Propertyfinder.com. Use of the basic service is free. Upgrade to a premium account (£99.95, but £49.95 during the current introductory offer) and you get access to legal documents, automated invoicing, web-based accounting software and more. In other words, the kind of things that would cost a great deal more than £99.95 if you handed them over to a lettings agent.
The Rat and Mouse's traffic is of a scale, now, which necessitates advertising to cover the costs of bandwidth (and for that, readers, we thank you). But we've made a decision to accept only the advertisers we feel have something genuine to offer our visitors. We believe LandlordNanny is an innovative and useful service, and we hope you'll head over and check it out.
The latest? A £4bn mixed-use plan, including homes for 7,000 people, due to start in 2012, ready by 2020. Details include 8m square feet of office space, shops and residential property, plus a six-acre public park, a new, 300 metre glass and steel chimney, and the world's largest solar-powered aircon system. Despite this...
"Once we have planning consent, we will have no shortage of interested parties who will want to come on board,'' said Rob Tincknell, managing director of Real Estate Opportunities' development manager, Treasury Holdings U.K.
... the details have been received with not inconsiderable skepticism, and - taking into account the site's recent history and the current economic climate - the Rat and Mouse isn't surprised. More here.
The club's keeping quiet, but there are whispers on the Guardian's sports pages that the Highbury Square might be big on deposits, but potentially low on completions when the 550 buyers who've stumped up 20% deposits are asked for the other 80% in the next two months. The clue might be here.
In the States, the FBI is getting tough on mortgage fraud, with 406 arrests, including developers, estate agents and mortgage brokers. Interestingly, the other credit crunch-related scam currently capturing the attention of law enforcement is the foreclosure rescue scam... the angel of mercy who promises to rid you of the risk of repo, before ripping you off for everything you have. As has been the pattern with the whole crisis, watch it in America first, and then expect expect arrests to follow shortly here. More.
And I thought they were a nicer bunch than this. Graham Norwood's piece on the practicalities of the gazunder ends with a reader poll. Clearly, option three - that gazundering might be more or less ethical depending on which side of the deal you're on - is there to find out how many 'tards read the paper. Regarding the yes/no crowd, I'm surprised to see the voting so close.
Apparently, it's all over. According to the National Association of Estate Agents, first-time buyer sales are up, general sales are up, the time between instruction and sale is down. Now, it's all just a matter of confidence. Personally, I'm not confident. More here.
The Telegraph visits wooden floor specialist Eelke Bles's Spitalfields loft, a genuinely remarkable converted shmatte trade sweat shop, which he used to store wood for a while before converting for domestic use. He now lives there, alongside offices and a furniture showroom. What's so remarkable about the story is his hands on approach, from design, to actually making much of the furniture. He's a talented chap. Read it, here.
Mervyn King's comments at yesterday's Mansion House dinner make interest rate rises sooner or later almost inevitable. Inflation is clearly the Bank's foremost concern (as, technically, it should be), and King seemed to ready to take on the property sector with the warning that out-of-control inflation would be as bad for house prices as higher interest rates. In other words... how do you take your coffee? Without cream? Or without cream? More here.
Regular Rat and Mouse readers might remember me busting a blood vessel over the details of Tory man-and-wife MPs Sir Nicholas and Ann Winterton's London living arrangements... the £700,000 property they own outright, the "family trust" they moved the property into in order to avoid inheritance tax, the £165,000 of public money they've managed to get their trotters on, paid as rent to themselves. Let's go back and revisit Sir Nicholas's indignant repost to the Standard when challenged regarding the arrangement:
The Globrix data reveals that 38% of us use the Internet to snoop on our neighbours’ properties. Forty per cent admit to regularly using the Internet to look at houses, 22% surf particulars for expensive fantasy homes, a hardcore 1% admitted to spending more than three and a half hours each week browsing property porn. But wait until it’s put into context. In the same poll, only 31% estimate spending more time on the mighty Facebook than on property websites; and property surfing also beats out holiday surfing, music surfing, and even conventional pornography. This reads like an obsession.
According to a very interesting piece in the Daily Mail, those of us scoffing at the Lance-Corporal Joneses queuing for their money outside Northern Rock branches last autumn might have been too cool for our own good. The bank apparently had detailed plans to freeze accounts, disable cash machines, shut down the website and empty branches, all within hours of what the documents describe as "D-Day".
Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, will, as predicted, be writing to the Chancellor to explain why inflation has hit 3.3% in May, 1.3% above the Government's target, and what it's planning to do about it. The first bit will fairly easy, but expect King to do a bit of pencil-chewing when it comes to the second. He has a choice. Kill the housing market and the wider economy with interest rate rises. Or let rampant inflation out of the bottle by keeping interest rates low. Best of luck. More here.
Just a fortnight ago, Nationwide's Fionnuala Earley was predicting rate cuts. Not from the Nationwide, clearly. Today's news is that their own rates are up, by as much as half a percent, from tomorrow. Hmmm.
Former Director General of The Office of Fair Trading Sir Bryan Carsberg, after a low-profile roadshow on behalf of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors in which he asked as what we thought about estate agents, published his findings today, with 30 recommendations. Ex-estate agent Henry Pryor is less than impressed:
The review that Sir Bryan undertook included a road show around the country where interested parties could contribute to an overdue debate. Unfortunately in at least one case it seems that the response was so poor that the event was cancelled. I managed to push my way past a dozen others who attended one consultation event in central London to find that even Sir Bryan didn't attend - leaving the evening to be compared by an RICS sponsor.
The apartment - two bedrooms in Islington - cost, according to Foxtons, the asking price of £550,000. Tony Blair's spokesperson has issued a denial that the flat was actually bought by mum and dad. He didn't, however, deny that the flat was now owned by Euan. How - asks the Independent - did 24-year-old Euan, who has yet to start his £30,000-a-year graduate-trainee stint at Morgan Stanley, arrange that mortgage? (The Rat and Mouse wants to know why he paid asking price.)
That's the question being asked by recent first-time buyers who've seen the value of their new assets fall, recently. The economists' answer - according to a survey by the Society of Business Economists for ITV's Tonight - is that it could take until 2012 for prices to regain 2007 levels. According to 44%, we won't reach the bottom of the slide until 2009. More here. The Tonight show is scheduled for - er - tonight, at 7pm on ITV1. This, from the ITV website:
According to the FT house price index, out today, London's three-monthly average is up 8.5% on the same time last year. Across England and Wales, the figure's up 3.9%. More here.
Thanks to the Rat and Mouse reader who spotted this:
Over to our reader:
It's not even a new development. Its not London. It's somewhere "Up north". It's in County Durham, and if your geography is not up to much thats about 20ish miles south-west of Newcastle. I know Howden as I used to live near by for a few years and it's not the nicest village in the world, bit chavtastic in my opinion...
The property's on the market for £249,950. The particulars are here.
I know, it's not really about property, but it's about London, and the Rat and Mouse has an ongoing interest in the Olympic story. Today, we know more about how exactly the Olympic flag will be handed to the Brits at the closing of the Beijing games. From today's Guardian:
With Gordon Brown and the Chinese leadership due to attend the event on 24 August, the prospect of diplomatic embarrassment looms.
You call that embarrassment? That's nothing compared to how the same committee responsible for choosing what looks like a middle-class 8-year-old's vision of gang graffiti as the London 2012 logo is planning to mark the hand-over. Continuing the London-as-Europe's-capital-of-gang-culture theme, the event will be celebrated with a performance by Zoo Nation, a street dance troupe best known for their Into The Hoods show, set on the fictional Ruff Endz Estate. Now, the Rat and Mouse is as interested in keeping it real as the next property blog, but since when did keeping it real involve the uber-privileged white, middle-class deciding it was appropriate to welcome the world's sporting communities to London by celebrating under-privelege, and doing so by borrowing the visual, dance and musical language of America? Wonder how these guys feel about that?
You can tell right away it's a Daily Mail story. Purbeck is apparently a place in Dorset (which is apparently a place south of London), and its local council is testing a planning strategy which involves charging homeowners £1,000 to grant planning permission for any work on the house which is likely to result in an extra bedroom. The justification? The maintenance of public transport and roads. Because an extra bedroom means an extra person? An extra car? Anyway, homeowners are less than happy with a situation in which they can't get a loan to move, if they do they're charged stamp duty, and now if they "improve" they're taxed £1,000 before they can even receive planning permission. More here,
If you've managed to get over the outrage of a proven CV liar being rewarded with a win on The Apprentice last night, you might be ready to hear about last year's runner up, Kristina Grimes, who is now - apparently - investing in new builds in Manchester.
To the Mercantile Group, who bought 50% of Chesterton back during the troubles of 2005, for a reported £3.1m. The deal - we're told - involves 34 original offices plus another ten franchises. Fourteen branches not included in the deal are likely to be sold by the administrator. In recent months Humberts shares have suffered a 94% fall.
It’s arguably a sign of our addiction to the property value game that we just can’t leave it alone, even when the market’s going nowhere. If we can’t move house or crow over theoretical riches brought by property market gains then we need to do something, even if it’s just to keep our hands busy. So the paintbrush acts a little like one of those fake fags. You fiddle with it to satisfy a craving.
Our publisher, on DIY and property values, in his guest column for Citywire.
The Rat and Mouse is always interested to discover new and interesting ways in which estate agents are using social media (and I've long been urging agents to blog). Nor is this the first time we've come across houses for sale on Flickr. But we've really got to take our hats (bowler for the directors, R&M baseball caps for the interns) off to Barnet estate agents Alex Kale, who mixes homes for sale with pictures of his Staffordshire Bull Terrier and his Porsche 944 Turbo all on the same Flickr feed. Proving that, in a Web2.0 world, there is no separation between the private and the professional.
It's the Communities and Local Government data - so it's based on completions and therefore accurate - and it shows a slight rise (0.7%) in the average house price in April. But don't get too excited. Annual house price growth continues to fall, down to 4.9% for the year. Interestingly, this Government data is one of the rare places you'll find annual house price change still in the black.
According to the Association of Residential Letting Agents (ARLA), 39% of agents are reporting tenant demand outstripping supply, and 77% of landlords are holding property with the intention of neither buying nor selling in the immediate future. A surplus of new-build two-bedroom flats is keeping rents stable in that particular area. In general, continuing demand looks likely, while it remains difficult to get a loan. More here. On the subject of loans, it's more difficult than it was to get one from Egg, the online bank owned by Citi, which - according to this - is pulling out of the mortgage market. It's also more expensive to get one from Busted & Broken, which is hiking rates across its offerings by as much as 0.55%. No doubt partly as a result, nobody's buying. According to figures from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) estate agents sold an average of 17.4 properties each in the three months to May. That's the lowest since records began in 1978. And they might be right to be wary. Data from the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) points to 23,000 potential negative equity cases in homeowners who took out 100% mortgages in the year to March 31. More on both those stories here. Finally, the other piece in the jigsaw, also supplied by the RICS, might surprise you. Sentiment - the estate agent/surveyor swellness quotient - improved marginally in May on less bad than expected sales figures. So, technically, what the figures reveal is marginally less rates of unswellness. More here.
He is, according to The First Post, and he's looking at a £3m, six-bedroom house in Canonbury. Not only that, but a £3m, six-bedroom Canonbury currently belonging to "a staunch Labour Party supporter". The Rat and Mouse wishes the agent tasked with this particular negotiation luck.
According to a Haart agent, quoted here. And here's business consultant and previous gazump-victim, James:
So, for example, if the property purchase took six months and I felt that house values had slumped during that time, I wouldn't have a problem gazundering the vendor.
Fair enough, and another reason why vendors shouldn't take homes off the market without evidence that the buyers has a mortgage offer in place and without a deadline for exchange.
Perhaps the most informed property enthusiast's website is www.theratandmouse.co.uk, a highly readable mix of fact and irony. It culls papers and magazines twice daily for property gossip, whether it is the latest legal action against a dodgy estate agent or the scoop on Bruce Willis buying in Marylebone.
Just some closing news and views before the Rat and Mouse puts on its Friday night shoes and heads out to dance the Fishstick... lenders are apparently interpreting yesterday's Bank of England decision to keep interest rates on hold by keeping interest rates on hold. And, er, raising them. Abbey and Broken and Busted have hiked rates, others - we suspect - to follow shortly. And in other news, the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) predicts that 5% of estate agents will lose their jobs this year. That's 15,000 estate agents with even more time to send anonymous tips to the Rat and Mouse. But then they're also predicting there'll be 1% fewer people in work across the board. So - there you are, guys - it's not all bad news. Have a great weekend.
It's a very interesting read. There are two quite distinct points to be made: one, about the expenses system in general as they relate to property; two, about the Blairs' specific mortgage claims. On the first, the Rat and Mouse has always seen the logic in MPs needing two bases - a constituency home and something close to the Commons - and it's clear that the job of constituency MP shouldn't be limited to individuals with enough private wealth to provide two properties. So there needs to be aid courtesy of the tax payers. What the Rat and Mouse has never been able to understand is why the people should pay the interest on the mortgage, but the MP should walk away with the property and any capital gains the property might have made during his/her period of service. So-called "grace-and-favour" homes - rent free properties, owned by the state, used by the MPs - would surely be fairer to all concerned. Or at the very least some system of recovering assisted mortgage payments from capital gains when the properties are sold. The Evening Standard piece shows how the Blairs' current property portfolio has been built on an expense-assisted initial purchase. On the second point, the newspaper has been dredging through Government papers made available via the Freedom of Information Act. Apparently, it didn't take long - because most have been shredded "by mistake" - but what the article suggests is the following. Constituency home, bought 25 years ago: £30,000. Cost of renovating (according to Ms Booth's autobiography): roughly £30,000. Mortgage serviced by the tax payer: £90,000. The tone of the piece is extraordinary:
In the letter, Mr Blair says: 'I understand the Fees Office has agreed to honour claims made on the original mortgage amount of £90,449.73 up until November 2009, when the original mortgage was due to end.' All of this poses a number of questions. First, the couple spent £60,000 in buying and renovating Myrobella, so why was Mr Blair claiming expenses for interest on a mortgage of £90,000? Of course it may be a legitimate claim. The rules allow a remortgage to fund essential repairs or improvements, but alas, no supporting documentation appears to exist in the public domain.
An odd time to launch an estate agency, you might think, but 
