BREAKING NEWS – 5 top stories 17/12/2020

STAMP DUTY EXTENSION – 77,000 MORE SIGNATURES REQUIRED

At present over 23,000 have signed a petition calling for the SDLT holiday to be extended, it needs another 77,000 signatories before parliament will debate it. Seven days ago the government stance was and still is …

‘The SDLT holiday was designed to be a temporary relief to stimulate market activity and support jobs that rely on the property market. The Government does not plan to extend this temporary relief… As the relief was to provide an immediate stimulus to the property market, the Government does not plan to extend this relief. SDLT is an important source of government revenue, raising several billion pounds each year.’

nurturingAI. PUTS AGENT IN DRIVING SEAT

Residential People is launching a cloud-based data sharing platform for agents that will help them harvest and nurture potential buyers, landlords and vendors looking to sell.

Retailers like Amazon are increasingly using Big Data, to pinpoint their customer and their preferred purchases. Keeping ahead of the estate agency curve nurturingAI. works this way.

An automated omni- channel marketing CRM using collaborative filtering – a way of predicting what people do and want. With 500 agents in various locations already expressing an interest in it, it already has a growing cult liker status.

Founder Chris May comments, ‘Quite rightly agents are protective of their data, but many do not do anything to make profit from it either. NurturingAi. helps a branch, so they are in touch with their customers even whilst they sleep.’

PURPLEBRICKS POST PROFITS

For the first time in over five years Purplebricks have posted a real profit, and although not a fan of onliners – being old guard agent – I like to nail my colours to the mast, I do grudgingly admire the fact that Purplebricks will probably list more property than Countrywide PLC, Connells and Sequence all added together in 2020, which makes them the consumers number one brand, if market share is segmented against brand alone.

Obviously, with 1.1M completions a year, 60,000 instructions netting down to a lower figure of completions is not in itself a dominating force, but does show underlying adoption by the property consumer. Agents may rage, but maybe time to look at what tech savvy consumer is doing – to do otherwise is to own defunct Woolies or the Arcadia Group in the near future.

SHORTGAGE OF INVENTORY

It has been reported that there is now a precarious imbalance between stock for sale and the amount of buyer’s now registered. The housing market is of course seasonal, and Christmas is a traditional time to rest property, but many agents say they are expecting a sharp uptick in mid-January when all the Turkey sandwiches are long gone.

JASON TEBB NEW CEO OF ON THE MARKET – AND ON LINKEDIN

New man at the helm of OTM has gone up in my estimation by a huge margin, he posted on Linkedin today, my weapon of choice where I love to bore my 17,000 connections on a daily basis.

He also had an ‘Ideas’ button on his post, – which given that OTM has been for me a portal that has a serious disconnect problem with its core agents, might be signs of happier times on the horizon, I will keep you posted.

If you have a view – please let us all know by emailing me at [email protected] – Andrew Stanton Executive Editor – moving property and proptech forward.