BREAKING NEWS – 5 top stories 15/01/2021

Estate Agent Networking Breaking News

PETITION FOR EXTENDING STAMP DUTY HOLIDAY – WILL HIT 100,000 SIGNATURES TODAY

With only 6,000 needed to sign the petition today, a debate on whether the stamp duty holiday will be extended looks certain, less certain is what the government will come up with.

NUMBER 10 AND PROPERTY INDUSTRY SUPPORTS DIGITAL LOGBOOKS FOR HOUSING

The government and the Industry support an accredited digital identity scheme for home sales.

Etive Technologies has secured an Innovate UK grant, to improve identity verification in the residential home buying and selling process, using a digital identity trust scheme.

The project will enable consumers to use one digital identity when buying or selling a home and share this with other relying parties such as estate agents, conveyancers, mortgage intermediaries and mortgage lenders, within a scheme framework.

Stuart Young, MD of Etive noted that “Currently a seller’s and buyer’s identity is verified up to 5 times by the different relying parties. Conveyancers, estate agents, mortgage intermediaries and financial services are regulated by different entities with various levels of oversight and compliance which can cause conflicting guidelines on identity verification.” This creates friction for the consumer, greater costs, and uncertainty.

The project, supported by the Law Society, CLC, SRA, CILEx Regulation, NAEA Propertymark, Guild of Property Professionals, RICS and National Trading Standard, is to create a centrally agreed framework, aligned to DCMS policy objectives and HMLR guidelines, against which all processes and providers would be accredited, to provide greater surety of data quality and reliance.

NurturingAI SETS UP NATIONAL PANDEMIC TASKFORCE TO HELP AGENTS

In response to Covid and lockdown 3.0, nurturingAI is launching a large national task force headed up by two industry heavyweights, Neil Comper and Jamie Osborne.

A 25-strong team of marketing mentors will give back more control to agents, with a solid blueprint of how to stay relevant, connected, and competitive in an uncertain Covid-19 world.

Christopher May, Director at nurturingAI and Residential People has put substantial funding in place to help agents, ‘We are in the middle of our third national lockdown, none the wiser about what the year will hold for both the health of the industry and the country as a whole. It is time to give agents a proper route map to generate income.

TikTok – THE TIMES – YOU READ IT HERE FIRST

The Times Newspaper has today an article on the use of TikTok in estate agency, we first published an item in our very own Editor’s thoughts this on Monday. Prompted by a reporter asking our views on the use of TikTok.

The Times article by Emanuele Midilo states, ‘For most people TikTok is a weird social network where teenagers perform dance challenges and gummy bears sing Adele’s Someone Like You. If you are over 40, chances are you had never heard of it until it made headlines last summer, when Donald Trump threatened to ban it in the US amid fears the app could pass user data to China — a claim the company denies. So why have developers and estate agents decided to use the platform to advertise multimillion-pound properties?

TikTok is a Generation Z stronghold: users aged between 16 and 24 account for a solid 41 per cent of its users. On the back of its incredible growth and impressive numbers, estate agents in the US have started using TikTok to push their properties.

US broker Alexander Zakharin from GZB Realty in New York, now one of the most popular property pundits on the platform with more than 75,000 followers, joined in February last year and quickly racked up millions of views. “Within three weeks I had 1.4 million views on one video,” Zakharin told trade magazine The Real Deal.

There are now plenty of “real estate agent guides to using TikTok” on the internet. Most of these first adopters, like Zakharin, are in the US. But the UK is catching up.

“I encourage all estate agents to join TikTok,” says the Proptech-PR founder (and Editor of Estate Agent Networking) Andrew Stanton. “Because if the younger generation use it as they grow then agents need to be in that space. If you’re not in that space, you will die.”

ROYAL INSTITUTE OF CHARTERED SURVEYERS WARN OF A SLOWING HOUSING MARKET

RICs has stated that the steam in their opinion is running out of the property market and there will be a cooling down. This is based on latest data.

Obviously, in the Editor’s opinion it must be balanced against – a very likely tweak to the SDLT extension and maybe a build up of further demand for property caused by Lockdown 3.0. As ever nothing is certain.

Andrew Stanton

CEO & Founder Proptech-PR. Proptech Real Estate Influencer, Executive Editor of Estate Agent Networking. Leading PR consultancy in Proptech & Real Estate.

You May Also Enjoy

how to present your property for sale
Breaking News

These are the property hotspots

These are the property hotspots bucking the SDLT deadline price slide Last week, the latest UK House Price Index from the Land Registry revealed a sharp 3.7% monthly drop in average UK house prices during April 2025, following the expiry of temporary stamp duty support at the end of March. Further analysis by eXp UK,…
Read More
Breaking News

Demand rebounds for Prime London property

Big ticket buyers returned to the capital in the spring months, the Prime London Demand Index from London lettings and estate agent Benham and Reeves has revealed. Between the first and second quarters there was a 1.8% uplift in ‘demand’ for homes between £2 and £10 million, which is calculated based on the proportion of…
Read More
Breaking News

Failing to refinance could see portfolio landlords hit with a £23,000 hike to mortgage costs

The latest research by specialist property finance expert, Rangewell, has revealed that buy-to-let portfolio investors who fail to take the appropriate action when it comes to refinancing could see their monthly mortgage costs climb by over £23,000, rather than a £8,500 reduction due to improvements to the mortgage landscape. Rangewell analysed the average amount owed through…
Read More
to let sign 2025
Breaking News

Section 21 Is Set to Go – What This Means for Landlords

By Allison Thompson, National Lettings Managing Director, Leaders The Renters’ Rights Bill is making its way through the House of Lords and, if passed in its current form, will bring major changes to how tenancies are ended. One of the most significant proposals is the abolition of Section 21, often referred to as the ‘no-fault…
Read More
Breaking News

Are falling mortgage rates fuelling a rise in buy-to-let investment?

By Sarah Thompson, Managing Director, Mortgage Scout The latest data from UK Finance shows that in the last quarter of 2024, the average buy-to-let (BTL) interest rate for new mortgage loans taken out was 5.09%, a drop of 0.61% on the previous year. And it seems that falling mortgage interest rates may well be having…
Read More
Breaking News

New survey reveals it now takes over 200 days to sell a home in the UK

The average number of days to sell your home in the UK now stands at 205 – the first time the 200-day mark has been broken. The longest time to sell is in inner London and the South-East at 222 days, closely followed by outer London at 221 days. The North-East is the best performing…
Read More