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.