Agencies & People
News covering the businesses, activities, people and personalities in estate agency and letting agency and wider residential property industry.
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Cameron Group opens in West Drayton
Cameron Group has opened a new office in West Drayton, following a six figure funding package from HSBC.
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Stunning views attract 20 viewings!
A three-bedroom detached bungalow in Alnwick, Northumberland, has sold for £181,000 – over three times its £55,000 reserve, at a Durham auction hosted by IAM Sold.
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Countrywide’s CEO Alison Platt takes new role focussing on sales and lettings
Countrywide CEO Alison Platt (pictured, right) is to focus her efforts on the company’s main property businesses and leave other areas to her new finance chief, it has been revealed today. The announcement follows recent speculation about Sam Tyrer (pictured, below), the company’s Managing Director of Retail and London, whose name was removed from the Countrywide senior team list, and whose LinkedIn profile gives an end date for her employment at the company. Retail focus At the time of joining Countrywide Sam was seen as one of the company’s new non-property, retail-focussed young innovators. Her arrival was part of Alison Platt’s drive to change the business from one dominated by long-serving property seniors into a more modern ‘integrated’ company. Sam was recruited by Alison two years ago to reshape the businesses’ sales and letting operations and was instrumental in launching its hybrid/online sales operation. But Countrywide now says there is to be a new organisational structure with Alison focussing on sales, lettings, financial services and commercial property. All the company’s UK-wide sales and lettings territories will report to Alison, including Hamptons International and its London and SE upmarket brands and City agencies including John D Wood. Countrywide’s new Chief Financial…
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London lettings showing “green shoots” says Foxtons
Foxtons says demand for rental properties in the London lettings market increased during the second quarter of the year, helping offset ongoing drops in rents. The company says in its latest lettings report that this is evidence of “stabilisation” within the market, which has witnessed decreasing average rents for six months now. “While this might not appear to be a significant increase, it comes against a backdrop of decline, suggesting that green shoots are starting to appear,” says Ed Phillips, Foxtons’ Managing Director of Lettings (pictured, below). The number of renters looking for property who are registered for each rental property offered by Foxtons’ branches increased by 3.3% during the second quarter of the year. But rents continue to decrease across many parts of the London lettings market, for several reasons. This includes the glut of properties created by the rush to buy properties before the extra Stamp Duty was introduced in April last year. Also, several large build-to-rent schemes have gone live in the capital this year, including the 1500-unit in the former Olympic Village. Zoned in Foxtons says the reason for this growth is an increase in demand for properties within London’s central Zone 1 and Zone 2…
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Sold! Auction house grows agent list by 25%
Auction house Network Auctions says it has grown its list of partner agents by over 25% so far this year, taking its total count to 100. The company, which was set up by Toby Limbrick, Stuart Elliott and Guy Charrison in 2009 says it has several more agent branches in the pipeline due to join its ranks. The latest to sign up is the Sherborne office of six-branch agent Rolfe East, which joins its founding office in Ealing, West London supplying properties to network’s regular auctions. Hotel hammer Network Auctions’ next event is at the Grovesnor Hotel in London on 7th September and Rolfe East Sherborne is putting up a Grade II listed former hotel in the village of Ash with permission to be converted back into residential use with a reserve price of £875,000 (see below). Rolfe East’s Managing Director and Sherborne office founder Lawrence Truett the reason so many agents are joining up with Network Auctions, and the reason he joined, is the company Network E auction product. This enables people to buy properties online which secures them an exclusivity period during which they have four weeks to arrange finance and surveys and preventing gazumping. “Network E is…
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Cardiff agent exposed for not paying National Minimum Wage
A letting agent in Cardiff has appeared in a list of over 200 companies in the UK for underpaying their staff the National Minimum Wage. Kingston City Properties, which trades as Kingstons Residential and is based in the central Cathays area of Cardiff, is one of the 230 companies who the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has identified as underpaying wages and fined a total of £1.9 million. Kingston City Properties has been going since 1999 and its letting business is well known in Cardiff as it sponsors the Cardiff Met rugby team. The companies on the list must also return the unpaid wages, which in the case of Kingston City Properties is £636 unpaid to one employee. This is the 12th round of ‘naming and shaming’ that BEIS has initiated and there are currently 2,000 firms under investigation at the moment. Once a company has been reported and investigated, it can then appeal but, if the appeal is rejected, their name is then published. BEIS says the latest list represents £2 million in back-pay for some 13,000 workers within the different categories of company, most of which are retail, food, hospitality and hairdressing firms. Since 2013,…
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Bom successo! Fine & Country grows in Portugal
Fine & Country has opened its 12th Portuguese office...
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ASA upholds two complaints against online agent
Complaints about savings claims by online agent HouseSimple both on its website and within a recent TV ad have been upheld by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). The watchdog has issued a detailed 1,500-word adjudication about the two complaints, one of which was about average fees charged by high street agents, and the other about how much vendors could save using the agent compared to a traditional agent. The adjudication’s wording also features an increasing weariness that another online agent had made claims that the ASA felt could not be justified or were misleading. This included the use of a 2011 Which? survey which many online agents have used in the past to justify the difference in fees between them and high street agents, and material published by the Home Owners Alliance. Website claims The first complaint was about copy seen on the HouseSimple website in February that claimed agents charged between 1.5% and 4% plus VAT to sell a home at an average cost of £5,237. The complainant challenged whether these figures could be substantiated and where therefore misleading, which HouseSimple said were based on the Which? report and a Home Owners Alliance secret shopping survey among agents, but…
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Are the Tories (finally) turning against Stamp Duty?
The campaign to reform the current Stamp Duty system and have recent increases for landlords and owners of high-value homes reversed is gaining momentum as a raft of the Tory MPs, think tanks and media line up. Yesterday the free-market supporting Adam Smith Institute said current Stamp Duty system is costing the economy over £9 billion a year because it prevents people moving to the homes they want near to their place of work, and that they must commute long distances instead. The Telegraph newspaper has also been running a campaign to reform the duty, which it says taxes too unfairly those who through no fault of their own have to pay high prices to move up their local property ladder. This week the right-wing MP Jacob Rees-Mogg (pictured, left) said the UK should move to a ‘low taxation’ home ownership model and that, in the same way a cut to business taxes helped stimulate economic activity, so a cut to Stamp Duty would achieve the same thing. And former Tory party leader Ian Duncan-Smith (pictured, right) said in July that that the government should be using Stamp Duty to encourage landlords, not put them off investing. “It is time…
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Hunters hit Tottenham
Hunters has launched a new branch in Tottenham, offering sales and lettings as well as block management in Tottenham.
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