FACT FILE

This has been a truly extraordinary week for mergers and acquisitions activity in the lettings sector. On Monday the private equity investor ICG spent £450 million buying Lomond Group. Just 28 hours later they bought the largest remaining independently owned letting agency in London, Kinleigh  Folkard and Hayward.  KFH is an extraordinary business.  I undertook…

The week after the Brexit referendum vote I lost every single business sale in my pipeline. It was heartbreaking, months and months of work all came to absolutely nothing. However after 32 years of selling businesses I have come to realise that these roller coaster ups and downs are all part of the job. The…

Almost every week we read about another letting agent who has had to pay an enormous fine for a compliance mistake but if my experience is anything to go by a great many letting agents are still making elementary compliance mistakes.  So what are the most common problems that I am seeing? The first is…

I will never forget my first day in estate agency 44 years ago. I had been recruited by the branch manager and I had never met the senior partner before I started my job. I was very young and very keen so I arrived at my office half an hour before it opened in order…

The Right To Switch Off

There have been a number of articles in the press recently that suggest that Labour might align CGT rates with income tax rates. This would have a catastrophic impact on landlords who wish to dispose of an investment property or business owners who wish to retire. At the moment a higher rate tax payer who…

Hardly a day goes by without another article about how AI will affect our lives but how will it affect the property sector? In the long term no-one really knows of course but in the short and medium term we are already seeing clues about its likely impact. The first thing it will do is…

It now seems almost certain that we will elect a Labour government on 4th July. So, what will this mean for letting agents? Well, this depends on the size of their victory and the type of Labour government that we get. If the election is a landslide our new government will have much more confidence…

My last article was about how the high street banks are failing to provide an acceptable level of service to their current account holders. However, their is a bigger problem still with the banks and that is that they are no longer prepared to lend money to business owners on acceptable terms. Until a few…

Almost everyone has a story to tell about their bank and very few of their stories are positive ones.    It didn’t used to be this way. I remember clearly the day that I opened my first bank account. I was 12 years old and my father took me to open a child account at the…