Zoomf Blog - UK Property Blog

There was an interesting piece in The Observer yesterday, where Oscar-winning John Battsek talks about his beyond unsatisfactory dealings with a certain mini-driving letting agent. Forget the fact that he missed out on a rental income to the tune of a few thousand pounds, his gripe is that he feels he was completely hustled by supposed ‘experts’.

John had never let out a property before and having been talked the talk by the local agent, and having received a healthy (realistically overinflated) rental valuation, he saw no reason not to list with Agent X. Although he was assured the market was as strong as ever, his property lay tenantless, managers wouldn’t answer his calls and viewings were scarce. I won’t name names when it comes to which agents did what, you’ll have to click through to the article for the juicy details, but you can probably make a fairly educated guess as to which agent was excited to get him on the books and then failed to ever deliver a tenant.

If you’re thinking of letting out a property, how can you avoid falling into the hands of misleading agents?

Well, a good place to start would be the fantastic list of questions that Which? have compiled. They recommend you visit at least three agents and understand all their fees and charges before you committ to anything and if they can’t answer all your questions satisfactorily, don’t list with them. Not everyone’s out to hustle you, you will find a decent letting agent if you do your homework.

What to ask:

· How many similar properties do you have to let?

· How many are not being let now?

· How long does it usually take from advertising to getting a tenant?

· Is anyone currently looking for my sort of property?

· What qualifications do your staff have in letting?

· Are you in a trade association? If not, why not?

· How are disputes between owners and agents settled?

· What happens about repairs in the home?

· If the agency handles repairs, am I charged cost price, or with a mark-up?

It’s not the easiest of times for estate agents, and it’s even worse over in the States. So what’s a struggling real estate agent to do to supplement his income?

Josh Flagg thought he had the answer, he started stealing paintings from his high-end listings. And we’re not talking nice paintings bought from the local gallery, we’re talking Picassos and Chagalls. The 25 year old Beverly Hills agent has been busted and is currently on bail awaiting charges. Which is lucky for him, as Bravo’s upcoming season of Million Dollar Listing is about to air…and he’s the star of the show.

Kinda good looking for a common thief…just sayin’

…are themselves beginning to sound like a broken record. Everything has to be on a biblical scale when we talk about house prices and today is no different, year-on-year house prices have fallen by 8.1% according to Nationwide. And, you guessed it, that’s the biggest annual drop since records began in 1991.

The average British home has lost almost £15,000 in value since July 2007 and the number of first time buyers has fallen by 41%. Read more at The Times.

A picture tells a thousand words

There’s a new place to search for property online, at least in the US anyway. Oodle are now proudly powering a new classifieds section on MySpace. The new and improved listings section is aimed to be more social than your average classifieds experience, with users being able to post listings for free that then link back to their MySpace profiles. Users can take advantage of MySpace blogs and bulletins to then promote their listings to their friends or allow other users to search for their listings naturally.

As well as the listings that MySpace users post themselves, users will have access to all the ads posted across the Oodle network, which currently gets around half a million new listings a day. At the moment, less than 1% of MySpace users actually look at the classifieds section, but with the right promotion this could be an interesting rival to the likes of Gumtree and Craigslist.

It seems as though all anyone wants to do these days is ‘be famous’. Everyone thinks they can sing, kids want to be the next Jordan or Beckham and celebrities are our new religious icons. I couldn’t believe it when I was in Sainsburys recently and picked up a bag of spinach that said ‘as seen on TV’, even fresh vegetables are trying to get in on the act. But did you know that your home could be the next big screen starlet?

Whenever you watch a programme or movie, you’re likely to see many interior shots inside houses. Depending on what you’re watching it might be a regular house in a regular street or it could be a grand old mansion for a period drama. Believe it or not, those homes aren’t built by producers just for a 30 minute episode, most of the year they’re inhabited by regular folk like you and me. So where do they find these houses? Simple, people register their homes with specialist agencies who then act as a middleman between you and the production companies.

You can read up all about it at ThisIsMoney and if your house is chosen you could make a tidy sum just as everyone else in whining about how much money their property is losing.

The great thing is that you really don’t need to live in a palace, they have to shoot crack den scenes somewhere don’t they?

You betcha it is! The last couple of gems to come from Real Estate Connect relate to some of the key problems that any real estate superhero has to face…

• Your inbox has a zillion emails and keeps getting more, how the heck do you stay on top of it?
• You’ve signed up to twitter and your dog is sick, should you tweet about it?
• You want to manage projects with clients and colleagues, can it be done easily without losing your sanity?

Connect helped property professionals to answer these questions and luckily for us folk who weren’t there, there have been some nice blog posts detailing what was said.

So, if your inbox is making you want to run for the hills then check out Jay Thompson’s post on AgentGenius - ‘Approaching Inbox Zero’. There you can learn how to delete, delegate, respond, defer and do, which should help your inbox shed all that unsightly excess weight it’s been carrying.

If you’ve been listening to all the hullabaloo about Twitter and want to start pimping your property company online, you may be wondering what the best way to go about it is. Well, as Todd Carpenter points out in his post ‘People Really Do Want You To Tweet About Your Cat’ over at RealEstateTomato, the agent who just tweets links to listings and data reports is unlikely to gain any new best friends any time soon. So does that mean it’s cool to tweet about things that aren’t property related, to be (dare I say it) unprofessional? Absolutely! Social networking for business is not about being the formal square in the corner.

And then lastly, if you’re looking for an easy project management tool, Dustin Luther suggests taking a look at BaseCamp. We use BaseCamp here at Zoomf Towers so we concur that it’s a great product (and with it’s 30 day free trial you can decide that for yourself before parting with any cash).

I can’t finish this post without mentioning one of the other highlights of Connect, the Inman Innovator Awards. Major kudos to all the winners, which include the super cool Lani & Benn from AgentGenius and Derek & Co from Roost.

I guess that’s it from Connect, until next time!

According to new figures from the Bank of England, in some parts of the country as many as four in ten homebuyers pull out before they complete. I’m seriously resisting a sexual innuendo here, even if theRatandMouse couldn’t on a different story a month ago. The Bank said…

“‘In the market for established homes, more transactions were falling through, with some estate agents reporting a cancellation rate of up to 40 per cent recently. That was partly due to the unwillingness of many sellers to accept a lower offer.”

But, understandably, many are resisiting buying now in the hope for a better bargain later down the line, which in turn is screwing up housing chains left, right and centre. All this coupled with record low mortgage approvals paints a pretty gloomy picture, unless you’re a landlord of course.