Property 2021 Feast or Famine?

Feast or Famine

In three and a half decades in property, 2020 was for me and I am sure you, the most exciting, devastating white knuckle ride that I can remember.

Like a badly mixed cocktail, with shots of alcohol/events that should never share the same glass, and two cocktail umbrellas, one Brexit the other Covid-19, it is time to down the whole concoction and brood on the hangover which might be property market in 2021.

RICS reports market sentiment now cooling, but every December this happens, and with property inventory per branch being at its lowest for decades, it is hard to say if mid-January will be boom or bust for the residential industry.

More subtle, nuances though will play out, just as Zoom became our new best friend, the real story was that adoption of technology takes years or can happen all at once.

Apply this to the present way business has been done by estate agents – and as CBRE said earlier this year – there will be a widening gap between digital tech agents and those who stay in the analogue world. With the modern agents focusing their tech on ‘analytics, management and experience.’

So, my view of 2021 and the housing market is I hope it remains strong, but the strongest and most resilient property businesses will be those who modernise, as the real enemy at the door is agents – ‘complacency or just doing the same thing.’

When your competitor is doing the same thing as you everyone gets a piece of the housing market pie, but if one single thing 2020 has taught us, businesses with big pedigrees in retail and other sectors are gone forever, why? The way they did business had become irrelevant, as the consumer changed the way they shop.

Property is a commodity, the second biggest asset class on the globe, and we are all in a service industry. We either plan, build, sell, lease, or asset manage things that humans dwell in.

The trickiest part of 2021 will be second guessing how our customers most want to do business with us. What communication channels and when; great rewards for those who get it right, and a nasty hangover perhaps for those who do not.

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

Breaking News

UK monthly property transactions for May 2025

Headline statistics from the latest transactions data include: the provisional seasonally adjusted estimate of the number of UK residential transactions in May 2025 is 81,470, 12% lower than May 2024 and 25% higher than April 2025 the provisional non-seasonally adjusted estimate of the number of UK residential transactions in May 2025 is 80,530, 13% lower than May 2024 and…
Read More
Breaking News

Construction Skills Mission Board (CSMB) shows the Government has a plan

The Construction Skills Mission Board (CSMB) held its first board meeting today (26 June 2025), where it set out a roadmap for recruiting 100,000 more construction workers a year by the end of Parliament. Richard Beresford, Chief Executive of the National Federation of Builders (NFB), said: “The Construction Skills Mission Board (CSMB) is a recognition…
Read More
Paint Stripper Tools
Estate Agent Talk

5 Strategies to Optimise Your Warehouse for Real Estate

The term fixer-upper can mean many things, from ‘slap some paint on the walls and it looks brand new’ to ‘will this building collapse if we open the front door?’ Indeed, in the dicey world of commercial property acquisition, each warehouse you buy will probably fall into both camps. Thinking about the viability of warehouses…
Read More
Breaking News

HMOs sell for up to 50% above market average

New research from Excellion Capital, the boutique debt advisory and investment firm, reveals that HMOs sell for as much as 50% above the average house price, further increasing their investment potential after it was revealed that HMOs also create rental yields of up to 12.5%. After previous research from Excellion Capital recently showed that the…
Read More
Breaking News

UK buyers struggle while 50,000 homes sit empty

As the UK housing crisis deepens, new analysis by Open Property Group exposes a worrying surge in so-called “zombie homes”- properties that sit unoccupied and deteriorating while millions struggle to access affordable housing. Key insights: 50,000+ long-term vacant homes in England alone 23,000+ of these have been empty for more than two years Estimated £13.6…
Read More
Breaking News

Breaking Property News 26/06/25

Daily bite-sized proptech and property news in partnership with Proptech-X.   The UK is Europe’s second most distressed market despite headline GDP growth Retail and Consumers Goods has emerged as the most distressed sector in Europe, with distress levels now the highest since the global financial crisis, according to the latest Weil European Distress Index (WEDI). The…
Read More