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House prices fall or rise (take your pick)
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House prices went up slightly – by 0.4% – in July, the Land Registry has reported. It

Knight Frank stay quiet after conman is jailed
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A tenant who faked his identity when renting through Knight Frank has been jailed for three

Rich overseas buyers keep prime London market aloft
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Chinese buyers are expected to replace Russian investors as major players in the prime central London

Moving occasion: today's the day!
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The most popular moving date is today, September 1, the Post Office has revealed. The two next

Prospective first-time buyers sink to new low
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The proportion of buyers expecting to buy for the first time in the next 12 months

Housing market 'edging towards double dip' claim
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Net lending plummeted in July to the second lowest monthly figure since records began in 1993,

Henry Pryor Blog
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Welcome to a new monthly blog by Henry Pryor, estate agent turned entrepreneur, inventor and expert

Rightmove profits climb 39% as more agents sign up
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A rise in the number of agents and an overall willingness to pay more to Rightmove

Portal creates new 'check out your competition' stats
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Property portal Home has created some new statistic pages on its site which we reckon will

Six in ten mortgages are now for house purchase
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The proportion of mortgages being taken out for purchases, as opposed to remortgages, is at its

News Story

Review of the Year: EAT looks at 2009

Monday 21st December 2009

A AHIPP: RIP? Not if Mike Ockenden has anything to do with it – he has spent much of this year trying to save the HIP industry (see O). A is also for accountable, a word the Government used a lot this year, meaning it isn’t, and everyone else is to blame.

B Sarah Beeny launched a private sales site, Tepilo, which agents thought a cheek, considering how much they’d helped her put her TV programmes together. B also stands for bankers’ bonuses, which got the London market motoring again this year. But now bankers face having to pay tax on their bonuses, which is good for votes, but talk about the law of unintended consequences.

C Climate change: this became the be-all and end-all justification for everything. People who do not believe in it are pilloried as flat-earthers by the PM himself. But how can we be sure the earth isn’t flat? It might just be the way it looks from space. After all, even fat women look thin when they wear black (lot of black around this Christmas). Also, acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer seem to have gone the same way as the millennium bug. Sorry, I really mustn’t talk like this, as I’ve just been sent to jail.

D Dubai: made our housing market look the picture of health. Digital property group: property portals (FindaProperty and Primelocation) unusual for still being owned by a national newspaper group – but just what is the Daily Mail’s strategy? We’re told we’ll know more next year.

E EPCs: these involve inspectors earning the minimum wage (actually less, because so few people actually pay them) having to drive miles in their cars to visit properties, and then drive miles back again, thereby merrily sending thousands of emissions into the atmosphere. Although an EU directive, we hear that countries like France and Spain have not complied, presumably on climate change grounds although it might just be complete inertia. E is also for Energy Savings Trust, a particularly useless quango (see Q) which wants all poorly rated properties to be banned from the market.

F Forecasts. These appear monthly, quarterly and annually, and we just love them. For every economist who says prices will go up, you can find another that says prices will go down, and a third who says they’ll stay flat. F is also for flipping, which is what a lot of our MPs did to screw personal profits out of their taxpayer funded homes. Franchising has continued to be an issue, with smaller agents (Hunters, Davis Tate) launching ‘personal agent’ models. F also stands for Foxtons, which fought and won (or lost, depending on which you believe) a case against the OFT on renewal fees but is now appealing. Fraud – there was a lot of it about, mainly in Leeds, while a juicy new case seems to be brewing in Birmingham.

G Global warming, see also climate change and EPCs. If only we could have heard more about these interesting subjects this year. G is also for Grant Shapps, high profile, good sport, and inadvertently entertaining shadow housing minister who appears to speak before thinking, which explains why he was first going to abolish HIPs “immediately” and only then realised there might be a lengthy and tiresome process involved. Still, we don’t think he’ll be much of a one for licensing and regulation (see L and R) if the Tories get in. G also stands for Google, which could launch a ground-breaking property engine search service once it lets consumers in on the secret. Finally, G is for Globrix which, irritatingly, hasn’t yet conquered the world and which The Times decided to part company with.

H Harry Hill: the man who made Countrywide the predominant agency force in the UK is stepping down (Harry, we’ll miss you). H is of course for housing ministers: we’re now on our ninth since Labour came to power. The current one is, er, you know, thingummy, what’s his name, um … John Healey. Well, for a little while, anyway.

I 100 days (all right this is a cheat). This is how long it would take the Tories to abolish HIPs. I is also for initiatives and we have had our fill of them this year, what with licensing initiatives, climate change initiatives, and initiatives to help home-owners. The point with initiatives is that they never, ever happen.

J Julian Bending is the Glastonbury estate agent who lightened our darkest days with splendid advertising that got him banned from all decent-thinking websites, including Rightmove, plus his local newspaper. Sample (describing a house with a view of Glastonbury Tor from its main bedroom): “Wouldn't you like to wake up to a massive erection?” J is also for jail, which is where people who don’t fully subscribe to man-made climate change are likely to be sent, without trial, to reconsider our views.

K Stands for Trevor Kent. Sadly, Big T is no longer our Friday ‘Something for the weekend’ columnist (it may have been the fact we didn’t pay him) but he still undertakes the odd assignment for us. Colourful highlights were his trip out in the Solent to inspect a fort for sale, and being one of only two journalists at a photocall to see Grant Shapps cut the HIP red tape around a property (the other journalist was from the Hendon Advertiser). Knight Frank – its partners still miss those heady times of two years ago when they shared an enormous bonus pool.

L is for Lloyds Banking Group and, by remarkable coincidence, LSL. The latter bought Halifax estate agents off the former for £1, with a hefty taxpayer-funded incentive to do so. L also stands for licensing: ARLA launched its own licensing scheme for letting agents and the Government said compulsory licensing of letting agents would be a jolly good idea – but failed to do anything. Has even more notably failed to say the licensing of sales agents might be a good idea.

M Mayhem: highly likely to ensue in the three-month time lag we now hear it would take to get rid of HIPs. Does that mean the housing market will close down for the whole of next summer should the Tories win the election – or will agents just ignore the requirement? M also stands for MPs, of all parties, who used their expenses and their properties to fleece us. We now hate them all, but are also grateful to them as they make estate agents look good. There was also Martin & Co, the lettings franchise chain, which has been having a high-profile tussle with . . .

N . . . NALS, the National Approved Letting Scheme, which found itself caught up in a series of unedifying problems at Martin & Co where some franchisees disappeared and/or went to the wall owing clients money. It’s over to different sets of insurers to argue it out, but the biggest property question of the whole year is: how on earth are agents ever allowed to be in a position to spend, steal or misappropriate money that isn’t theirs in the first place? Now this really is where a future government should legislate – and quickly. R should stand for reform, not regulation, but anyway, see R.

O No look back over the year would be complete without Mike Ockenden, director general of AHIPP, who spent 2009 battling to keep the HIP industry going – even taking legal advice as to whether there’d be a case against both the present government and any Tory government. The OFT (is this a Quango, see Q) was also never far from our minds, with yet another study into the home buying and selling process: full results expected in the new year. However, its preliminary reports stress that its research was based on woefully small samples, so why did it ever get this far?

P Partners: this is a word that is right up there with stakeholders (see S), climate change and global warming. P is also for polar bears, see climate change and global warming. P is also for Propertyfinder which was sold by the disenchanted Times empire and is now part of Zoopla – a landmark sale because Propertyfinder was first of all the UK property portals. Director Nick Leeming, with it from the start, must have to draw on all his reserves to be discussing yet another business plan with yet another boss. P also stands for Property Ombudsman Scheme, as the Ombudsman for Estate Agents became known during this year (another body trying to take over the world). And for Property Standards Board which wants to do something about estate agents – not quite sure why, but the words ‘light touch’, ‘regime’ and ‘licensing’ send shivers up our spines.

Q Qualifications is the name of the game for all agents now. Sit down, boy, and take an exam! Q also stands for Property Information Questionnaire, which became mandatory in HIPs in April, when first-day marketing bit the dust. Q is also for Quango, which may have enjoyed their last year – if the Tories get in, they say they will get rid of most of them. With luck, that will mean goodbye to the Energy Savings Trust.

R Regulation, regulation, regulation: how we all just love it– which is just as well, since it has, as usual, continued to increase. Also stands for Rightmove, whose market dominance is so huge that it leaves all contenders for second place standing several miles back. But is the mighty Rightmove machine finally crumbling – in November, its shares fell 10% in a day after it was found that Google had been cosying up to estate agents. Register of Property Agents – a Bill McClintock initiative, pressing ahead with its mission to ‘license’ all individual sales and lettings agents. R is also for repossessions – about 48,000 this year, less than the 75,000 predicted.

S Stakeholders. Another of this Government’s favourite words: it cannot do anything without consulting stakeholders, and then taking absolutely no notice of what they’ve said. Memo to careers advisers: do not encourage school-leavers to become stakeholders, as there is no job satisfaction. S also stands for SPLINTA, Nick Salmon’s long-running fighting group against HIPs, which had another busy year.

T is for Tenancy Deposit Protection. Three different schemes, with three different arbitration schemes, produced different results, and one of them, the TDS, is putting up prices because of the sheer number of disputes, including an argument over £4.50. This year, we also discovered that tenancy deposit protection has a flaw – landlords have to abide by it, yet the legislation is there to protect tenants. T is also for Twitter, which a number of agents (and EAT) are now on, although none of us are sure why as it seems totally pointless. Finally, T is for ‘transparency’, of which the Government is almost as fond, in its dear foggy way, as ‘accountable’.

U is for unfair dismissal. The case involving an agent who was sacked after spending ‘hundreds’ of hours of work time on online gambling and porn sites and who then took his employers to tribunal for unfair dismissal, was one of our top-read stories this year. You couldn’t make it up.

V is for valuations, and the growing problem of down-valuations, where valuers didn’t want to be caught out by falling prices and lenders didn’t want to lend anyway. Agents paid the price in fall-throughs. V is also for vetting tenants, which came to the fore this year, with landlords not wanting to find themselves with unemployed tenants falling into arrears. But should tenants have been vetting their landlords?

W is for Winkworth, the long-standing franchise operation which floated on AIM this year in order to fund its expansion. We will be hearing a lot more of this next year.

X marks the spot where so many agents went out of business or simply left their high street premises. According to research from the British Property Federation, one in six agency offices closed up this year. Their figures seem to agree with falling agency numbers on Rightmove.

Y Your Move, with its sister company Reeds Rains, will suddenly grow in size in January. They are dividing up between them the Halifax branches bought by their parent company, LSL.

Y is for You Tube. Our favourite story of the year was the AHIPP video which had first been broadcast at the Tory party conference and was up on You Tube. Unusually, viewers could neither rate it nor comment on it. Undeterred, an undercover organisation calling itself ASSHIPP doctored the film with some hilarious captions. AHIPP was not amused. The original AHIPP film was taken down, along with the ASSHIPP spoof – the latter allegedly for copyright reasons.

Z Zoopla is still the new boy playing amongst the portals. It had quite a year, launching its own portal in February, and then buying first Thinkproperty and then Propertyfinder, before merging all three on to the one Zoopla platform. Interesting times beckon for the portals next year with Google having all the functionality and already most of the properties to take the UK property market to another stage.

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Editorial Contact Details - Rosalind Renshaw | rosalind.renshaw@estateagenttoday.co.uk | 01252 843 566.