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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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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Humberts launches first dual online and high street lettings service
Humberts has launched the UK’s first switchable online-only and traditional managed lettings service for landlords. The announcement comes five months after the company said it would be relaunching its lettings operation headed up by high-profile industry executive Suzanne Diamond (pictured, below). The new online offering is called Humberts Lettings Direct and will charge landlords £199 plus VAT for advertising on Rightmove and OTM as well as deposit and first-month rent collection, referencing, contract management and legal protection insurance. Humberts says the £199 will then be deducted from any fees charged should a landlord then switch to the traditional approach. But rather than the company build its own technology, 175-year-old Humberts is partnering with proptech start-up Propoly. Propoly started up three years ago as Nanoget before changing name and joining angel investment firm Pi Labs, initially presenting itself as an alternative to lettings agents for landlords and tenants. The company’s board includes non-executive director Margaret Longden (pictured, right), who is Countrywide’s Retail Programme Director and who, from 2010 onwards, helped expand the PLC’s lettings business. Also, Countrywide holds 366,034 Series A shares in Propoly. White label technology Humberts is using a white-labelled version of Propoly’s technology, which is essentially a messaging platform…
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Online agent’s latest property price map… bombs
Estate agents are always publishing guides to local, regional and national property markets but online agent eMoov has produced one of the more unusual ones. The company has launched a report on where to buy a home should you wish to avoid the major impact zones that would be created by an all-out nuclear attack on the UK. The company believes the tensions between the US and North Korea stand a good chance of triggering World War Three and is concerned what this might mean for the UK property market. Rather than build a nuclear bunker, as most Swiss did during the Cold War years of the 1970s and 1980s, eMoov suggests buying a home outside the areas most likely to be bombed by the intrepid North Korean air force, which eMoov concedes has a way to go before it is able to target the UK. eMoov has launched what is calls a ‘nukemap’ as a handy guide to fall-out averse home hunters, although they will have to be rural enthusiasts; the agent believes most of the UK’s cities will be bombed including Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester, Hull, Nottingham, Birmingham, Cambridge, Norwich, Oxford, London, Bristol, Swansea, Southampton, Brighton,…
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UK takes lustre off gleaming Savills half year results
Savills half year results have revealed global turnover up by 15% to £714m and underlying profits were up 27% to to £32.4m. But an otherwise glowing half year report by the company was offset by poor results from its UK operation, where underlying profits dropped by 27% to £5.4 million. Its UK fee income dipped by 4% to £55 million down from £57.2 million and like many of its competitors Savills blames the surge of purchases before the additional Stamp Duty was introduced during 2016 for the lower volumes within the prime residential market compared to last year. Other factors Savills blames include the political and economic uncertainty created by the General Election and Brexit which, it says “make it difficult to predict market volumes for the rest of the year”. Savills said a weak April was offset by a stronger May and June compared to last year, although this is because those months last year were “muted” by the run up to the EU Referendum vote. Worst performing Within the UK prime property market the worst performing sector was new homes in which new development stock dropped by 6% and prices dipped by 4% to an average of £750,000. This compares…
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80% of UK buyers unimpressed by newbuild homes
The British public are falling out of love with newbuild homes and most would prefer to see the billions being poured into developments spent on refurbishing existing traditional housing stock instead. Research among 2,000 people reveals that 81% of them are “unenthused” about living in a new-build home while 79% said the government should focus its efforts and funding on refurbishing existing, run-down properties. The figures during the same week when NHBC revealed that the number of new homes registered within its scheme decreased by 7% to 29,123 during the second quarter of the year. The government is concentrating its efforts on new-build to fill the gap between demand and supply in the UK, and says it will build 1.5 million new homes by 2022. But former housing minister Grant Shapps recently said two million homes need to be built as soon as possible to achieve balance in the property market. More new homes Over the past 12 months 147,960 new homes have been built and, supported by the government’s Help to Buy scheme, the number of new homes coming to the market increased by 21% year-on-year during the first three months of the year, figures from the Department of…
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Leeds letting agent gets green light for unusual branch
For decades Foxtons lead the way in estate agent branch design with its signature shiny green signs, lounge-style sofas, drinks bar and funky desks. And for many rivals they irritatingly raised the bar of what the public expects of agent branches. But now Foxtons has a contender which has taken branch design to the next level and that, planners have said, will “raise the standard”. The company is Leeds-based student letting agent iFor Homes, which has just had plans for a novel take on the letting agency branch approved by Leeds City Council. Northern Eye UK, the parent company of iFor Homes, has been given permission to convert a Victorian Grade II listed building in the centre of Leeds (see above) into a hybrid café and letting agency branch (see left), as well as two apartments to be created upstairs. The new branch will be in the centre of city’s student area with both Leeds City College and Leeds Beckett University opposite. What used to be a seedy bar (see below) and separate residential dwelling are to be turned into a single unit (see right) and the façade of the building upgraded and refurbished. Plans seen by The Negotiator show…
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