Newspaper gets to grips with property industry

Only the Grauniad newspaper could run a column under the headline, ‘Credit crad fraud’. However, the piece, by Patrick Collinson, bears closer inspection.

Once the writer had got off his chest about how a fraudster had stolen his credit crad, he recounts a meeting he had with the bosses of the National Landlords Association and the Association of Residential Letting Agents.

Now the Guardian is to private property what Karl Marx was to the upper classes. And indeed, Collinson starts by saying that letting agents, estate agents and landlords are usually the villains in his articles.

“At lunch,” he writes, “I wondered if I should employ a food taster to check what they might have slipped into the sea bass. But rather than a bust-up, it turned into something of a love-in.”

Heavens! And what brought this on? Well, marvels Collinson, the NLA is throwing its “full weight behind the court case against Foxtons, probably London’s brashest estate agents. The Office of Fair Trading claims that terms in Foxtons’ residential letting contracts are so onerous and one-sided that they are illegal under consumer legislation – and the NLA backs the OFT”.

Never mind that it would be rather odd to find a landlord body supporting renewal fees, especially when there’s a chance they’ll be ditched, so let us pass quickly on to Collinson’s encounter with Peter Bolton King.

Here, Collinson finds himself nodding in astonished agreement as Bolton King talks of the need for licensing to weed out rogue letting agents.

There is, of course, absolutely nothing new about this message. The professional bodies have been banging on about licensing for years and successive governments have taken not one bit of notice – until yesterday.

Perhaps the Grauniad could investigate why.