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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Guild and online agent easyProperty merge in £60m deal
The Guild of Property Professionals has struck a £60m deal with online agent easyProperty.com to enable its 5,000 members to use the website’s online sales and lettings packages. The deal, which will complete later this month, also merges the Guild’s parent company GPEA, which also owns 300-branch network Fine & Country, with easyProperty, to be called e-Prop Services. The new company will be headed up by GPEA executive director Jon Cooke(pictured, below) who will also be CEO of e-Prop, while easyProperty founder Rob Elice (pictured, left) will remain with easyProperty. He says the Guild and Fine & Country members will be able to target a wider range of sellers and in particular those at the lower end of the market, who are largely the price-sensitive bread and butter of the online agents. “This deal allows our independent agents to offer more consumer choice with sales and lettings products catering to both the do-it-yourself and the do-it-for-me vendor and landlord preferences. “We recognise the market requires and demands both online products and traditional methods. What I’d like to stress is this newly merged business is the convergence of traditional estate agency and online. “Effectively we are providing independent agents the ability…
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Countrywide CFO Jim Clarke retires, replaced by former G4S finance chief
Countrywide’s long-serving Chief Financial Officer Jim Clarke is to retire in July, making way for Himanshu Raja, who joins the company’s board on Monday and will take up position in August. Jim Clarke (pictured, left), who has in the past also taken the role of media commentator for Countrywide and recently led a share placement of nearly £40m to fund the company’s hybrid estate agency roll-out, has been with the company since 2007. His background before joining was in the hospitality and fitness sectors first at pub chain JD Wetherspoon and before that at David Lloyd Leisure. His retirement comes almost exactly two years to the day since two of his former colleagues, Bob Scarff and Nick Dunning, resigned from the company just nine months after Group Chief Executive Alison Platt took the helm. Clarke was also one of eight senior management figures who sold shares options worth millions in 2015 following the company’s return to the stock market in 2013, in his case worth £2.4 million. He is being replaced by Himanshu Raja who until last year was Group Chief Financial Officer of security firm G4S where he earned £1.7 million a year. He has been on sabbatical since…
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Boxing event raises £18k for Noah’s Ark Children’s Hospice
A charity boxing event held in association with Landlord Action and sponsored by Hamilton Fraser raised £18,000 last week for Noah’s Ark Children’s Hospice. The sell-out Rumble with the Agents evening featured six boxing matches watched by guests who enjoyed a three-course dinner at the Holiday Inn hotel in Finchley Central, North London. Organised by Landlord Action’s and TV star Paul Shamplina (pictured, far right), the audience included a range of property professionals including sales and letting agents, developers and industry suppliers as well as representative from the charity. A raffle was held by former Tottenham Hotspur captain and 16-times capped England player Gary ‘Mabbsy’ Mabbutt (pictured centre left), who oversaw lively bidding for sporting memorabilia including a signed Arsenal shirt from 1971, a signed Anthony Joshua boxing glove and an original 1996 World Cup final ticket signed by Geoff Hurst – which sold for £750. Mabbutt is an ambassador for the Noah’s Ark Children’s Hospice, which is the chosen charity of Tottenham Hotspur FC. The boxing matches were fought by ten participants with little or no previous boxing experience but who had undergone a regime of training and coaching before the bouts. All ten come from property industry backgrounds. The…
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Top high street firms outperform online agents, research shows
The top-performing high street agents in the UK outperform online agents in all areas including achieved asking price and time taken to sell, it has been revealed. Research by consumer advice website HomeOwnersAlliance.com found that the top 1,000 best performing agents achieved on average 100.35% of their asking price, “suggesting that sellers can still maximise their home’s potential by selecting the correct local agents”. These agents also have a much better sales success rate than online agents, the research reveals, and sell 82.42% of homes listed with them compared to 51.98% by online and hybrid agents. “Sellers who look carefully at their local market before listing their home for sale will probably still be better off instructing the best high street agent in their area,” says Paula Higgins, Chief Executive of the HomeOwners Alliance. But for those looking for a quick, easy sale with surprisingly high rewards, online agents are an excellent and rapidly-improving option.” But the performance of online agents versus the whole high street market compares less favourably for traditional agents. Asking price The research reveals that online agents achieve a higher percentage of the asking price than their high street competitors despite charging on average £850 in…
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Mandatory three-year tenancies questioned by leading lettings agent
The UK’s largest lettings agency Belvoir has set itself against all the mainstream political party manifestos and the Association of Residential Letting Agents (ARLA) by questioning the need for mandatory three-year tenancies. The Conservative Party seeks to “encourage landlords to offer longer tenancies as standard” while Labour goes much further, saying it will “make three-year tenancies the norm with an inflation cap on rent rises”. The Liberal Democrats advocate “longer tenancies of three years or more with an inflation-linked annual rent increase built in to give tenants security”. But Belvoir’s latest lettings index shows that 43% of tenants who rent through its branches stay for between 13-18 months, 29% for between 19-24 months and only 18.2% for more than two years. ‘Question the need’ “Looking at the manifestos of all political parties it would seem that all are looking to introduce three-year mandatory tenancy agreements although [our] figures question the need for this as our tenants can already rent with confidence, and most opt to leave when they wish to do so,” Belvoir says. But not all landlords agree with Belvoir’s point of view. As we reported last week, one of London’s largest Build to Rent landlords recently scrapped deposits…
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Govt lettings squeeze drives up rents as landlords exit
The number of properties available to rent has fallen and prices are rising as the government’s recent Stamp Duty and tax allowance changes take their toll on the the lettings market, says franchise giant Belvoir. “Belvoir’s Q1 rental index, which is prepared for us by property expert Kate Faulkner, has identified some interesting trends, which we believe are a direct result of recent changes to BTL legislation,” says Belvoir’s Chief Operating Officer, Dorian Gonsalves. This includes that the number of landlords bringing between six and ten properties to the market has declined while the number of landlords bringing up to three properties to market remained static. Dorian says the reasons for this include additional Stamp Duty for buy-to-let property buyers and the radical changes to the way mortgage interest tax relief is calculated, which has reduced or cancelled out profits for many landlords. Lettings To counter these measures, Belvoir says, landlords are seeking the highest rental prices for their properties and driving up rents across the UK which have risen year-on-year by 5.75%. “Since 2008 [when Belvoir began its index] rents have moved broadly in line with wages and large movements over and above +/-5% rarely happen,” says Belvoir’s Chief…
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Purplebricks shares jump by £45m in one day
Purplebricks shares rose by 4.32% or £45.8 million yesterday during trading on London’s AIM, valuing the hybrid estate agency at £1.11 billion. At the end of trading, Purplebricks shares price stood at £4.10p, nearly four times its price in mid-November last year and the highest it has been to date – a year ago they were trading at just £1.37p each. This means the company, which recently launched a new tranche of ‘commisery’ TV adverts, is now valued at nearly three times the market capitalisation of Countrywide, and almost as much as Savills although it still has some way to go before it reaches ZPG (£1.63 billion) or Righmove (£4 billion). Belvoir Lettings also saw its share price rise yesterday, by 2.34% to £1.06p but Countrywide’s share price dropped by nearly 3%. Encouraging results Purplebricks’ most recent trading statement on the 4th may saw its share price rise by 2% on the back of good news from its UK operation including instruction growth of 83%, and “encouraging” results from its fledgling Australian operation. At the time leading investment advice website Motley Fool pondered whether its then share price of £3.22p could ever reach £4, surmising that “Purplebricks could quite conceivably…
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New office for Douglas & Simmons
MPL Interiors completely refurbished the premises, with a contemporary front-of-house and a more quirky, individual back office...
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Maguire Jackson brings online to Birmingham
Maguire Jackson has launched an online residential sales service designed for Birmingham homeowners to combine the cost advantages of national online agents with the benefit of local market knowledge and offices.
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Moore Allen and Innocent’s £1m half hour
Charlcutt Barn near Calne was one of the highlights of an auction in Cirencester on 30th March, when nearly £1 million worth of property was sold in under 30 minutes by auctioneer Roy Bowyer of Moore Allen & Innocent.
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