business
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Features
Business recovery opportunities
The recent recession, caused by the Brexit vote, had a huge impact on the value of many residential property assets – but it has created some very interesting opportunities.
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Features
Referrals… commission… fees
Offering mortgage referral services to new investors, experienced landlords – and homebuyers – could secure your agency’s future.
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Guest Blogs
What’s gone wrong?
Our industry, says Frank Webster, has lost its sense of purpose, but as more regulation sweeps in, there is a chance to rediscover its purpose and create a respected profession.
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Guest Blogs
What’s your agency’s Plan B?
Planning expert Dominic Dear shares his thoughts on why agents are missing a trick when it comes to winning new instructions.
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Features
How to sell your business for a better price?
Running your own business can be exciting, fulfilling and profitable, but there comes a time when selling up is the best way forward. Sheila Manchester asked the experts.
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Features
How Brexit is affecting – and going to affect – your business
How far should Brexit influence our business decisions? Many people said “batten down the hatches”, but, says SDL’s Rob Clifford, we’re now one year on and the storm is still brewing.
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Latest property news
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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Latest property news
Merge! Close! Sell!
It’s been Spring Cleaning time in the property agency market as the larger groups take action to maintain profits.
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Features
How smaller agents build bigger businesses
While some take fright and sell up in uncertain times, says Sheila Manchester, bolder souls build business in their quest for success.
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Features
Can proptech change the industry or is it all just an expensive experiment?
The first wave of the digital revolution hit in the early noughties – soon after that Rightmove and later, Zoopla, were born. But 15 years on, the next giant leap has arrived which, if its proponents are to be believed, will have an equally profound effect. You may have noticed it. Everyone is now talking about ‘proptech’; the community of small to medium-size new companies that are launching online services into the property market both for agents and consumers. But rather than monolithic giants like Zoopla, proptech firms are a swarm of smaller businesses changing the way property transacts, bit by bit, with no less potential impact. In the past 12 months we have witnessed a significant proliferation in the number of start-ups entering the market. Some of the digital world’s best minds are fixing their brains on making the property game more seamless, not only for purchasers and vendors but also for agents, investors and developers in the sales market. “The property market is an industry steeped in history and, to a certain extent, set in its ways but, perhaps later than other sectors such as retail or transport, technology is starting to have a real bearing on the…
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