BREAKING PROPERTY NEWS – 22/06/2022

Daily bite-sized proptech and property news in partnership with Proptech-X.

 

Property Market: Boom or bust, does it matter? There is a bigger threat to the industry

Everyone knows that asking prices are going skyward and agents have very little inventory, vendors are getting greedier as they need higher amounts to cover the cost of their next move, and despite a base rate of 1.25%, the housing market is in rude health.

But if you scratch under the surface and look at the figures such as the just released by the Gov.UK analysis the amount of completed sales is dropping:

“The UK Property Transactions Statistics showed that in April 2022, on a seasonally adjusted basis, the estimated number of transactions of residential properties with a value of £40,000 or greater was 106,780. This is 12.1% lower than a year ago (April 2021). Between March and April 2022, UK transactions decreased by 3.9% on a seasonally adjusted basis.’

Now at some point, rampant house inflation could be dampened by the increasing cost of borrowing. But if wage inflation, spearheaded by bodies such as our friends who keep the railways running and their large pay increase demands becomes a reality, will anyone care.

In terms of industry sentiment and chatter, many are very bullish about their indexes, especially their end-of-year performance for 2021, but what will the end of 2022 look like? It is great that property sells in days if correctly priced, but if you do not have enough stock how do you cover your overheads.

What we are seeing is that many of the big fish are quietly buying up large tranches of agencies with a lettings focus, and utilising software to push efficiencies across their enlarged network. And I see nothing that will stop this combine-harvesting approach from stopping anytime soon.

Estate agency in the UK may well be a national cottage industry, made up majoritively of a huge rump of one and two-branch concerns run by highly experienced owners, but the scope for keeping these businesses at a level of high profitability is becoming far harder. Not so much due to competition, but more because the general public has been conditioned to want more for less, and to want things done now rather than next week.

This new generation which I term the smart/lazy generation buys and sells things in a digital way, they order goods and services in an almost zombie-like digital way with a few clicks on their mobile.

Their parents might feel that dealing with James the local owner of an agency who has been in business selling and letting property for 30 years is the person to deal with. But the next generation uses their digital side to ‘find’ the best agent for them, negating the old ways of doing business.

“If an analogue agent feels they can continue in a business-as-usual way, ask yourself why when 90% of agencies still have their agency doors locked are you still doing business.”

 

And there are two points here, if an analogue agent feels they can continue in a business-as-usual way, ask yourself why when 90% of agencies still have their agency doors locked are you still doing business.

The second point is that the general public, or the younger smart/lazy generation, never sleep. They are being consumers and communicating with everyone 24/7, it is just what they do.

If agents do not have a method of digitally delighting them, a strategy where they can engage and do property stuff, then focusing on the problem of where to get the next property or letting listing from will pale into insignificance faced with the paradigm shift in consumer behaviour.

Agency is a people business, but if you no longer can talk to them in the communication channel of their choice, at their favourite time, they will seek out agents who do and will. Amazon is a marketplace that never sleeps, very soon property will follow suit.

Proptech SME YouConvey gets £300k funding

In what is increasingly becoming a vertical, digitising the boring bits so more fee-earning upfront processes can take place, YouConvey, founded by Eddie Goldsmith, has just received investment to scale up its operations. Nova Growth Capital saw the opportunity.

What is good news is that the founder knows all of the pain points of the process, with his huge amount of industry knowledge, and is not creating solutions in a vacuum without market insight, a thing that in my day job as a consultant to proptech founders I see too often. Commercial ideation fails as founders and their teams fail to see what is really useful tech.

Though very much buzz words ‘upfront information’ is the thread of what YouConvey operations are all about – a type of triage service that keeps all the stakeholders in the loop, saving time and getting that all-important change of ownership over the line.

What is truly noteworthy is that small solutions like YouConvey have scalability, they are not looking to overhaul the conveyancing or buying process, they are just a digital hand tool that empowers the user so they can do the day job better and more quickly.

This is better than trying to herd a lot of people to do things in a different way. Technology should not disrupt, so much as it should gently and invisibly nurture and speed operations.

 

If you have a view – please let us all know by emailing me at editor@estateagentnetworking.co.uk – Andrew Stanton Executive Editor – moving property and proptech forward.

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

Home and Living

Best Budget Smartphones Under $200

In the rapidly advancing digital era, it’s no longer a luxury but a necessity to have a smartphone. Not everyone however needs or is able to pay hundreds of dollars for an expensive device. The good news is that there are numerous budget smartphones under $200 that provide great performance, decent cameras, and a long…
Read More
Rightmove logo
Breaking News

Ten years on: More first-time buyers moving to cities while the coast stands still

New ten-year analysis of the property market shows that more first-time buyers are looking to move to cities, while the coast has seen no growth in new buyers First-time buyer demand to move to Great Britain’s 50 largest cities (excluding London) is up by 16% on average over the last ten years, with Dundee topping…
Read More
Breaking News

Homeowners in England and Wales overvalue their properties by an average of 16%

Homeowners in England and Wales are overestimating the value of their property by an average of 16%, according to new figures. Data from Quick Move Now compares homeowner estimates with formal estate agent valuations and is broken down by both region and property type. Overall, homeowners overvalue in every single category.   Regional breakdown Region…
Read More
Visual blemishes on Roads due to service upgrades
Estate Agent Talk

Emergency Sidewalk Repairs: When to Act and Who to Call

Sidewalks are the unsung heroes of city infrastructure—quietly assisting tens of millions of footsteps every day. But when they crack, disintegrate, or shift all of sudden, they might quickly turn out to be volatile liabilities. In a town like New York, in which pedestrian site visitors are constant and belongings proprietors are legally chargeable for…
Read More
Breaking News

Reapit report reveals agents’ long-term market confidence amid legislative challenges

Despite the significant challenges posed by a shifting economic landscape and the largest wave of housing legislation in decades, estate and letting agents remain steadfast in their confidence about their long-term future in the industry. According to the first Reapit Property Outlook Report 2025, covering the full breadth of sales and lettings agency opinion countrywide,…
Read More
Breaking News

Owner-Occupiers Drive Resilient Commercial Property Market

Buying Becomes 37% Cheaper Than Renting The latest Commercial Property Demand Index from specialist property finance expert, Rangewell, reveals that while investor appetite across the sector held steady in Q2, strong levels of owner-occupied commercial mortgage activity are helping drive market performance, as business owners increasingly move from renting to buying their long-term premises for…
Read More