FACT FILE

There has been a lot of publicity recently about Rishi Sunak’s attempt to make school leavers better at maths. I use maths in my job every single day but it is addition and subtraction and ratios and other simple mathematics, all of which I had learned to do by the time I left primary school.…

A few years ago we saw a spate of estate agencies charging fees to their buyers rather than to their sellers. They were able to win instructions by offering to sell houses free of charge but of course this wasn’t really true because the buyers would simply deduct the agent’s fee from the price that…

We are achieving all time record prices for letting businesses at the moment but the buyers are becoming increasingly choosy about the sort of businesses that they want to buy. As a consequence, the price differential between the best letting businesses and the rest is wider than it has ever been. So, what constitutes a…

Unfortunately, I am often asked to sell businesses for people who are seriously or terminally ill. I am also regularly asked to sell businesses by the relatives of people who have died. These situations are always harrowing to deal with but a recent case was particularly difficult. The owner of a small letting business passed…

The relationship between solicitors and estate agents has always been a difficult one. Estate agents often get very frustrated by what they see as unnecessary delays and poor communication. Solicitors often get frustrated by unnecessary calls from estate agents asking for updates and many agents’ lack of understanding about the conveyancing process. Relations have become…

Most people would agree that Liz Truss was the worst Prime Minister that the UK has ever had and thank God that she has gone. The question that remains, however, is how someone so unsuitable could have been selected for such an important job? The Negotiator magazine is not the right forum to investigate this…

In last month’s article, I said that good agents can make money during a downturn in the housing market. In view of the economic damage caused by Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-Budget, it seems appropriate this month to cover this topic in much greater detail. Let’s take as an example an estate agency which generates income…

A lot of working practices have changed forever as a result of Covid but more than three years after the pandemic started, the time has come when we must question whether all of these changes have been sensible. Let’s start with the issue of working from home. The arguments for and against this policy have…

Back in the 1980s, I used to write a regular property column for The Sunday Times. The article that attracted the most attention by far was entitled, “Beware False Prophets.” It was a warning to the public about how to avoid being caught out by estate agents who overvalue their property in order to gain…

The consolidation of the letting industry continues at a frenetic pace and hardly a week goes by now without a story of yet another independent agent being snapped up by a larger competitor. However, we are approached on a regular basis by people who want to retire but do not want to sell their business…