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A Challenge to Estate Agents to Improve The Housing Market in the UK

We all deserve a better housing market in which to find and purchase houses and flats for ourselves so I now challenge all estate agents and the landed professions to a full debate on the merits of my prescribed solution to the present and unacceptable house-price crisis, as well as to discuss the pressing need to correct the insufficient number of houses currently being purchased for owner occupation.

“There’s currently NO genuine competition between sellers who employ their own agents, as happens at present. I propose that instead, estate agents should be working for buyers in a similar way to travel agents and sales of tickets in the airline industry.” Travel agents help travellers to find the best value holidays for their chosen destinations.  This is what should also be happening with housing.

House prices themselves should find a level based on real competition. For this to happen, housing should be priced in a similar way to the methods used in the travel industry.

Fair competition should be introduced into our housing markets so as to achieve best throughput in the market, whilst maintaining price stability by using The House Price Solution.

The proposition:
Here is the essence of what I am saying by using this method.

It involves a complete and permanent change in the way estate agents deal with residential house sales.

As far as residential sales are concerned, to use this solution, only Registered House Agents (RHAs), would be licensed to deal with residential sales & purchases. The key difference is, this would involve a new type of agent which would always be acting for the purchaser rather than the vendor.

Existing Estate agents could continue to offer both sales and management services to all their existing clients except on residential or part residential property sales. In other words, sales of all types of property other than residential property may be dealt with in exactly the same way as before by existing estate agents.

Only Registered House Agents (RHAs), would be licensed to act in dealing with the sale and purchase of residential property. They would also be licensed to manage such property.

Those licensed to act in such matters would be expected to have passed a new qualification prior to obtaining a license to carry out this type of business.

You may ask in this case, would anyone else be allowed to act on behalf of those wishing to buy or sell residential property?

The answer is no. Market forces will be harnessed to act both for sellers as well as buyers by using different and competing Registered House Agents, tasked with the work of obtaining for their clients, the best combined buy and sell prices in the market whenever moving house.

Competition would be achieved because the selling process would normally be done using a separate and competing RHA in every case.

Whereas selling residential property may only be carried out by Registered House Agents (RHAs), existing professional buying agents may continue to operate as normal by negotiating terms of purchase on behalf of buyers as they do at present. The difference for them would be that they would be dealing with Registered House Agents when buying rather than with estate agents as at present.

This unique plan is designed to eliminate the exaggerated house prices which are being quoted and are seriously damaging our housing markets.

By stabilising prices in this way many more people would be able to transit between properties, as and when they may need to.

Your thoughts are welcomed on this new idea for smoothing rising house prices whilst helping to stabilise the capital values of privately owned residential property as part of this process.

What do you think about this idea for drastically improving the operation of all housing markets potentially across the whole of Britain?

Constructive comments are very much welcomed.

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Please enter your email address carefully. I always reply to emails so if you don’t hear back it may be your email address was incorrect.

I may not reply straightaway if I’m busy but if you haven’t heard after a while, then check that the email address you provided us was correct.

If so, then please get back by sending your message once again, also giving me a phone number to contact you on as well.

I look forward to hearing from you.

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The Politics of Housing

The Politics of Housing is necessarily societal. In other words you can’t really divorce housing from politics.

When canvassing for the Brexit vote in 2019 and accepting becoming our Prime Minister in July 2019, Boris Johnson promised that his government would be a government inclusive for all in society; having won the popular vote on that basis.

Whatever political view individuals may take, it would appear that there are three institutions that should be held as being vital to the wellbeing of present day society. These are The Judiciary, The NHS and The Town and Country Planning Acts.

Whenever setting out to make new policy for the benefit of Britain’s populace, these three and established pillars of fairness should always be carefully considered.

Tough love, directed towards some parts of society, may well be necessary for its further improvement but it would, by its own definition, have to be based on love and nurture and not prejudice.

However even so, the noblest of such decisions, taken in the quest to improve the lot of society may occasionally fail, especially where housing matters are concerned.

What follows is a set of proposals specifically designed to resolve the present housing distribution problems.

FIRSTLY: Before designing a new Town & Country Planning system, ideally for the whole of Britain, it would be a very good idea to get a clear picture of what might make each local community thrive, and then incorporate precisely that into the new planning model.

To date we have seen little evidence of such an approach and practically no justification for the arbitrary zoning designations which are being proposed in the Planning White Paper currently being debated in Parliament. This does, therefore, deserve further and serious consideration.

In peacetime (i.e. whilst our country is not at war with another), residential planning consents should be delegated to all local town or parish councils for them to determine, depending upon local housing need.

This way, genuinely democratic decisions may be arrived at using local decision-makers whom are best able to understand what the current needs of the community are at any particular time.

The clear and over-riding objective must surely be for ordinary working people to be able to find openings for good new jobs close to where they may live.

This should mean the forward plan ought to involve a proper debate with business leaders to start searching for and employing more-skilled people, including training them up and paying them adequately whilst expecting more productivity/profitability from them in return.

Such an outcome and gain to industry could be achieved from increasing the incentive amongst school leavers and university graduates alike to decide on a higher-skilled career for themselves earlier, and then to train them more intensively for that.

Those youngsters who do not choose to follow this clear path would be likely to have to accept the unskilled jobs which there may be and at low wages (albeit with little or no prospects), of course.

This is, in effect, increasing the incentive for job seekers to decide what they would like to do earlier and to embark on getting the necessary training and qualifications which they will need for their choices of career.

Other successful economies have already achieved such outcomes and because this has been done elsewhere it could certainly be done in Britain, if the incentives were provided.

One organisation, KPMG (the accountancy conglomerate) is already in the news for helping in the battle for greater diversity among types of job, especially within the poorer communities, by offering apprenticeships. It wants nearly a third of their staff to be coming from working class backgrounds by 2030. Enabling diversity of perspective, fresh thinking, and, wide-ranging insight which should help all businesses to perform better.

People coming from routine maintenance and service organisations may apply. Levels of pay and prospects in life really matter to employees but so does aspiration. Van drivers, butchers and factory workers should be among those applying for schemes such as these if they should wish to do so.

What is Levelling Up really about?
Added to this post 2 jan 2022:

Levelling up is about empowering local leaders and communities.
It’s about raising living standards and growing the private sector.
It’s about spreading opportunity and improving our public services.
It’s also about boosting local pride and improving our local environments.

Young people should be empowered to learn all the skills they need in order to be enabled to use their passions and their abilities to help them get good jobs in the future, wherever they may choose to live.

All this is can now be achieved with the localised Towns Deals which are being made available by government as well as the Community Renewal Fund and other funds also to do with Levelling Up.

Under the present government you can search online for:
Department for Levelling up Housing and Communities

Equally important however is resolving the house price crisis itself!

To find out all about everything to do with the extreme lack of adequate and available housing on the market and how to deal with the non-affordability of it, click below.

This House Price Solution is devised to resolve the current housing crisis completely

You can either comment there, or go back to ‘The Politics of Housing’ and post your comment here.

What do you think about this idea for drastically improving the operation of all housing markets potentially across the whole of Britain?

Constructive comments are very much welcomed.

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Where are estate agents going wrong nowadays

Where are estate agents going wrong nowadays?

Well, first please fully understand that the vagaries of the housing market are complicated as most people will admit.

As a senior contributor and property surveyor of 30 years working experience I have watched how things have been going for several decades and a clear picture is at last emerging.

The estate agency sector, since the last war, has been increasingly failing to balance demand and supply in the housing market over the decades for reasons other than the imbalances in supply and demand!

The problem is that the estate agency sector itself is mistakenly working on the basis that the demand for housing is economically highly elastic whereas housing supply, they would frequently tell you, is highly IN-elastic. They say, that it is this mismatch which is causing price peaks and troughs in the housing market to occur. This argument is completely wrong for the reasons I will now set out.

Firstly, the supply of houses coming onto their books is not IN-elastic and neither is it dependent upon the total number of houses actually built.

Here are some other reasons why they are mistaken:
As just explained estate agents are actually only dealing with the number of houses currently on the market – or on their books, from a supply point of view. This is quite different from the total supply of all the houses currently built and in use in the whole country!

Once they ‘get this’, they can free themselves from such confusion and begin to help those wishing to instruct them when moving house. They ought to be able to do this for those hoping to buy their next house in any case.

Secondly, and on the fluctuating level of demand for houses from buyers, the agents generally assume this is highly elastic in nature but sadly this is again mistaken.

In fact, agents very much affect the level of demand from buyers directly, (by affecting the number of homes coming onto their books as mentioned above).

This is because buyer demand is greatly affected by the level of wealth of buyers wishing to buy houses at any one time.  Understanding this is very important for generating successful house completions, especially because buyer demand is not highly elastic at all.

Why is that? Because overstating the asking prices of houses going onto the market will put many buyers off, lessening demand. In addition, it also provides misleading information to sellers concerning apparently increasing prices, which can also put many sellers off; rather ironically.

I say this because if agents were to act for buyers instead of sellers, they would see the various opportunities available in the marketplace quadruple, bringing many more house hunters onto the marketplace and thus onto the agents’ books.

Once agents realise that they do in fact influence the number of houses coming onto the market (i.e. by influencing the total supply of houses becoming available for purchase), then business will increase for the agents because this depends on the way in which they interact very much with the buyers as well as with sellers.

This means they should realise that they can and should influence the number of houses sold from a buyer’s point of view, since that must depend on the levels of wealth currently being enjoyed by those in the market to buy themselves a house at any one time.

It should be stressed, acting as an agent in housing is completely different from agents who may be selling, for example, expensive cars and/or yachts, because house agents are dealing with capital assets, not depreciating assets or chattels. Capital assets require extra special skills, involving advising buyer-clients, rather than merely advising the seller, after having obtained a selling contract!

Please understand. No current asking prices indicate a house’s true market value. Neither should you think that whatever reduction you can negotiate will be the actual market value of the property. The asking price is just part of the marketing. Most sellers are optimistic, all selling agents are ambitious sales people and so most sales naturally complete for less than the initial asking price for that very reason.

Therefore and in conclusion for the reasons I have just provided, prudent agents should be acting for or serving buyers as their primary clients instead of sellers, in order to bring about the greatest number of sales in every specific market situation.

Prices should be dependent upon or determined by what different buyers might be willing to pay. Where estate agents almost invariably go wrong, is they confuse this with how much buyers can each individually be made to pay!

Doing the latter is incorrect and it is that which actually causes markets to begin a ripple, which then results in price peaks and troughs, inflating and then deflating again and again on a regular or cyclical basis, throughout the various housing markets, spread across the whole of the UK.

Please notice these peaks and troughs do not always coincide with periods of greater and lesser wealth.

This explanation supports my argument that agents should change their mode of operation to one of acting for buyers rather than for sellers. As well as that, it fully explains that the massively increasing price levels we see currently are not as a result of increasing net wealth but these are in fact more to do with buyer coercion. Such coercion must be taken right out of the agency-equation if prices are to stabilise at safe and supportable market price levels.

What do you think about this idea for drastically improving the operation of all housing markets potentially across the whole of Britain?

Constructive comments are very much welcomed.

Footnote:
This is not to say new houses should not be built to provide new accommodation, wherever this is strategically necessary within each local jurisdiction.

What do you think about this analysis of the present situation please?

Comments are moderated but constructive ones are always welcomed.

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The Cure For The Malady Across All British Housing Markets

The cure for the malady across all British housing markets is to use a combination of two cures, in a similar way to a doctor using two specific antibiotics to cure a bacterial infection.

The expertise required to achieve that would involve first acquiring an accurate knowledge of the causes of such infections and following this, the ability to diagnose the correct medicinal cure for the specific infection involved.

It is of course imperative to be able to understand precisely how and why a specific illness or malaise will have occurred. Only then can the correct medicinal cure be prescribed.

Peter Hendry says, “I can explain in simple terms why house prices are continuing to rise despite the increasing lack of affordability affecting ever more prospective buyers.”

In a nutshell, the housing market should find the values of houses in a quite specific way.

The true value (or the correct buy price), of any house being offered for sale should be arrived at by adding THREE separately-assessed components together:

1 The land value – which depends in part upon location.

2: The construction cost (including a profit element to the builder or developer).

3: A further amount of equity or profit produced as a result of having combined these two.

These are the things that a sensible buyer should theoretically be considering, even if only subliminally.

All too often however, anxious buyers will base their offers on a combination of how much they could possibly afford and borrow, together with knowing the asking price being quoted.

“What makes this task particularly difficult to quantify is that house prices in today’s housing marketplaces are not derived in perfect market conditions at all. The reason for this is because in a perfect marketplace, the whole amount of homes on the market would be sold and the demand for them would also be fully satisfied at all times.”

IF, housing markets around the whole country were near perfect, economically speaking, it wouldn’t take a year or more for each house-move to happen. Houses and flats going onto the market would take much less than a year to attract a buyer ready to complete on their purchase. 

There would then be fewer unsold and empty properties waiting to find buyers. Supply and demand would be in balance. House prices would enable this to happen and would facilitate sales to take place more swiftly than upwards of a year.

On the rental side of things, here markets are in a very different situation. There are far more people wanting to rent than there are rental properties available. Also, the supply of flats and houses is shrinking currently, which is forcing rent-levels to inflate. Demand for these properties seriously outstrips supply, economically speaking. Here, the obvious solution clearly has to be to provide more properties available for rent.

It should be noted however, if there were to be less unsold properties at any one time, there would be a lessening of demand for properties to rent, because more tenants would’ve become buyers! Therefore, improving buyers’ markets would clearly help with lessening the rental-demand side of things as well. That would be an important added bonus for both marketplaces, which is why ‘The House Price Solution’ is the final answer.

Instead, the present day housing markets have large overruns where, either there is too much property being offered at any one time or alternatively, there are too few properties being offered to purchasers.

Both extremes are most unsatisfactory for prospective purchasers of houses in the regional marketplaces and especially in tourist and second-home prevalent communities.

Unfortunately, current day estate agency does not assess house prices in the way described just now. Instead they peg asking prices at the level they might simply guess they could sell a house for but also they may well often include what their client (the seller) might hope to achieve when determining an asking price!

Worse, they base their asking prices on what other asking prices are, including what the other recent sales will have achieved, albeit these would have used skewed marketing comparisons themselves for the reasons just set out.

To justify what is being explained here, a year ago for example a typical estate agent had 37 properties available and 379 applicants on their register (according to statistics published by the NAEA). Today, after a spirited first half of the year and after COVID has started to reduce, a typical estate agent apparently has just 23 live listings and over 400 applicants on their register.

If knowledge such as this were to be broadcast, it would skew prices-levels downwards whilst the market is flush with houses for sale and it would skew prices-levels upwards when there were not enough houses coming onto the market – as now.

In the former case, sadly there is inherent pressure within estate agency to want to hide the true facts of an excess of properties being listed for sale compared with buyers so as not to spook the market and to keep things going as smoothly as possible, rather than face the reality of a downwards-changing market, with prices dipping.

In the latter case however, with too few properties on their books and too many buyers wanting them, broadcasting the lack of supply actually helps agents to justify trying for rising prices even against general economic trends! This has been what’s going on recently of course.

Selling agents may try to argue that it is the desperation of buyers which is forcing the prices up but that does not explain why the housing markets are operating at such low efficiency in terms of completed sales. This shows serious imperfections, resulting in their lack of stability which means these markets are in need of a completely new approach to buying and selling houses.

In my analysis and resultant diagnosis following understanding the true causes of these problems, two specific ways to deal with them emerge.

A: Firstly there should be restrictions on the right to occupy a proportion of houses in each locality as being permanent “Primary Residence” restricted. This would mean these houses would be for use only by local people, such as key workers for example.

Most people seem to agree that each locality absolutely needs housing to be affordable to those fulfilling the essential roles in their community. This should therefore be enshrined in each area’s local planning rules.

In peacetime (i.e. whilst our country is not at war with another), residential planning consents should be delegated to all local town or parish councils for them to determine, depending upon local housing need.

This way, genuinely democratic decisions may be arrived at using local decision-makers whom are best able to understand what the current needs of the community are at any particular time.

The different local housing markets could be brought to balance and price levels better able to reflect local demand for housing, more appropriately.

Secondly and very importantly:

B: The emphasis on all prices should be changed so that these are set by ‘buyer offers’ rather than seller price-rigging, which is of course not an open market practice in any way if this is carefully scrutinised.

This is where The House Price Solution (formerly described as The Hendry Solution) could come in. It allows for both of the essential changes cited above.

It would do this by re-shaping house sales methods entirely and by including the use of “Primary Residence” restrictions on certain properties.

AND

It would enable all buyers to be free to participate and establish the price levels themselves, (subject to declared “Primary Residence” restrictions, which would be locally established using the local planning rules).

For the full details of how to address all these issues simultaneously, please follow the link:

The House Price Solution

How to Improve all local housing markets in England and Wales

Posted by: Peter Hendry, Housing Valuation Consultant

Author of:– The House Price Solution otherwise known as The Hendry Solution.

What do you think about this idea for drastically improving the operation of all housing markets potentially across the whole of Britain?

Constructive comments are very much welcomed.

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Buyers need far better representation in the British housing markets

With estate agents acting primarily for sellers and land owners, buyers get poor advice or representation all too often.
Even though they are the ones raising (and usually borrowing) the money for each transaction, they are often the last ones to be told how things are progressing, especially where chains of other sales are involved. A lot of patching up of interlinking chains is frequently going on behind the scenes, which is not necessarily to the advantage of unsuspecting buyers further down the chain. Sale prices at the lower end may require to be re-evaluated.

This is inefficient and ought to be changed otherwise the different local housing markets across England and Wales cannot begin to function more like perfect marketplaces as they should do.

All this happens because estate agents are primarily motivated to try and obtain the best price they can for whatever asset it is they are selling, since they are contracted to act on behalf of the seller. The buyer is often the last person to be told when bids in competition with their own are are being negotiated by the selling agent and then the only remedy remaining for them is to have to find more cash to increase their offer!  It operates rather like a sort of clandestine bidding war usually conducted over a telephone.

House prices as a result, are now passing all time highs but also, they are increasing beyond average couples’ annual earning capabilities for maximum borrowing requirements. This is a big problem especially where earnings are falling. It’s vital that a more generally acceptable approach is available to everyone embarking on house moves, especially if they are first-time purchasers. Purchaser mobility ought to be what should be improved.

The only way this could be done would be to change the way residential property is sold by having agents acting for buyers instead of only acting for sellers.

It is clear that existing estate agents are understandably likely to be reluctant to consider such a change for as long as they can continue to control sales progress in the way they have done essentially since the 1920s.

It would require the buying public to start complaining about the anomalies they are having to contend with when using agents, as well as to prevail upon government to make the necessary improvements to bring about fairer but competitive pricing processes across all residential property markets. Only then could house prices track buyer purchasing power in the localities in which each particular property is located.
The correct solution to this problem does need further in-depth explanation in order for the concept to be fully understood.

What do you think about this idea for drastically improving the operation of all housing markets potentially across the whole of Britain?

Constructive comments are very much welcomed.