That’s the conclusion by one of the old guard amongst surveyors who used to do these in the days when you could just tell it like it was.

There are problems nowadays. One, is the requirement to pepper all reports with copious quantities of disclaimers, caveats and suggestions to get further tests and more specialist reports. The result of all of this is often that most ordinary buyers will simply not understand the relative seriousness and insignificance of what are often minor matters and will take fright, often deciding against buying the house at all!

A second problem is that surveyors are discouraged from saying what’s good about any particular house (incase they might make a mistake). Not exactly helpful!

Surely even-handedness is what’s really hoped for by both buyers and vendors, not the expensive fence-sitting verbiage and the arse-protecting garbage that we get in survey reports nowadays.

The RICS ought to sit up and take notice, if it wants its professional standing in the property sector to be retained.

For as long as these problems are unresolved, we advise potential purchasers to get an experienced local builder to go round the house with them instead.

Who agrees or alternatively, would anyone prefer to defend the RICS?
We’re interested in hearing about readers’ particular experiences during the past year or so.

Posted by: Property Match (UK): The modern way to market houses

The most significant difficulty causing the market to fail is undoubtedly the problem that asking prices are being ill-conceived.

Clearly, people need to be ‘educated’ about what current prices are. Equally clearly this education needs to come from estate agents to their clients; and it’s not.

On reason why it isn’t happening is that even estate agents don’t seem to have much of a clue about valuing (or appraising) houses.

This is quite simply, totally unacceptable.

It’s GOT to be sorted out, for the sake of all those selling, or wanting to sell, but also so that buyers can have the ‘confidence’ to know what market values currently are, for what they are thinking of buying.

For example, if a vendor is offering (through estate agents, as their appointed agent) a house at say £200,000 and the best interest the agent can get for their clients is a succession of offers at £170,000, then any seller should be made to understand that the current price of what they are selling cannot be £200,000. Also the estate agent needs to understand that these offers are material when valuing the house in the current market. These, together with actual evidence of recently completed sales, should be used to re-calculate the house’s present value.

The really important bit though is: – if the same logic could be applied to any house that the seller wanted to buy, that same seller would realise they could be more relaxed about the level of price they needed to attain; as the buy price would and should also be similarly affected in a downturn.

Unless and until both these things can happen, chaos must continue across the whole housing market. It really is that simple and it also is really that simple to find the way to get the whole housing market working again; chiming in unison, flowing like a well established river! When this happens, people would be able to move from one house to another relatively easily, which is one of the main reasons for wanting to be owner-occupiers in the first place?

Estate agents need to take the lead here because they are the lead players in the task of finding new buyers for houses, in this country.
I really hope they will soon accept this and act accordingly, but am firmly of the belief that if they do not, other businesses will spring up and do this in place of them.

The most obvious way for this to happen would of course be via the Internet. But the revolution would have to be from sites that take appropriate responsibility to get the houses advertised, marked up at prices which are within the correct ‘valuation range’ – and not simply quoted piecemeal, as happens at present.

This is the challenge.

The gauntlet has been laid down by the recent collapse of the housing market – without any shadow of a doubt.

The winners will be those who take action to embrace these vital changes to the old methodologies, without waiting until it’s already been done (by others).

Best of luck for the future, everyone!

Posted by: Property Match (UK): The modern way to market houses

This is causing extreme pain for those who have diligently saved throughout their lives, for their old age.

The other effect that continuing low interest rates is having – in the face of rising inflation is, it is putting the housing market into utter turmoil with wildly varying asking prices and such confusion that sales are floundering, just when we all need stability, in this particular marketplace.

What can be done? If low interest rates must continue, the way houses are appraised for sale needs urgently to be tightened up, so that buyers are no longer continually misled by wrong asking prices.

This problem is further compounded by a widening regional discrepancy in asking prices. The increasing gap in actual completed sales prices also seems to be widening across different regions. This obviously causes difficulty for those attempting to move from one area to another.

The author, a retired property valuer, has been aware of these problems in the private housing sector for a considerable time, and it is abundantly clear that very little is being done to resolve them.

The large discrepancies between asking prices of similar types of property, even in the same area must stop. This is resulting in differing sale prices eventually being achieved for such properties, due to market confusion.

If instead, prices quoted on sales particulars more closely matched actual achievable prices for the houses in question, people would be able to see what they could afford to buy and what they could not. More transactions would be achieved as a direct result.

This is the true goal and would get the housing market working smoothly, and remaining stable, in all external economic situations.

This is precisely where the Government should be more proactive. To create a future stable housing market, with a steady number of sales and purchases proceeding to completions, should be its ultimate goal.

It would be perfectly possible to arrange this by changing the way houses are currently evaluated by estate agents.

The outcome may involve a slightly greater fluctuation in actual sold prices depending upon the present economic conditions, but because all the asking prices would be more closely related to one another, less damage to individuals’ budgets would occur.

Moving house, even in difficult economic circumstances, would become possible. This is the holy grail, both for individuals investing their earnings in their houses, and for the increased electoral opportunities for any government offering this.

It would not be difficult to re-train estate agents to do this, instead of perpetually trying to lift prices for their selling clients, whatever the market conditions. (It appears this is all they currently know how to do in order to keep winning new instructions.)

What they should, instead, be doing is providing best advice to their clients on how much to sell their existing properties for; in the the current market conditions. To achieve this they would need to face up to having to charge an upfront fee for providing full advice. Market appraisals would then become proper market appraisals, not just instruction-winning tools.

Everyone would be winners.

Posted by: Property Match (UK)/Asking_Prices: Peter Hendry, Consultant in Housing Valuation

The idea of owning your own home (rather then just renting it) is partly so that YOU can decide when you want to move, and where to. It’s also to enjoy a return on your investment, over time.
I am concerned about helping large numbers of people, by creating a perfectly stable housing market that stays ’stable in throughput’, no matter what the rest of the economy is doing over time. This has never been achieved before but at Property Match (UK) we have discovered the correct formula to achieve this.

In essence, the estate agents past model, which is fatally flawed, has been to try and create a price stable market, with generally increasing asking prices.
The result, which we can all see, is massive house price growth followed by stagnation in demand as prices fall back.

By comparison, our idea is instead to have a market that is stable in throughput, but not prices. This means people can move between houses more easily, whatever the prevailing prices, because prices are, of course, always relative at any one point in time. Instead of using agent’s psyched-up prices, true market-driven prices, will generate a continually moving housing market and thus ability to change between houses quickly, in any state of the market.

In this model, prices will be capable of fluctuating even more than at present but because all prices will stay close to each other, relatively speaking, (like the Red Arrows flying in formation,) everything will work satisfactorily. Forward progress will be maintained at all times.

Additional advantages will become available, especially for first time buyers, as whenever prices are generally lower than usual, they will be able to get onto the housing ladder more easily.

For more information about this exciting new method to smooth the housing market, please read our earlier posts explaining the various aspects of this market-price model, for an all new private housing market in the UK.

More on how we think a turn-around in the housing market may be quickly achieved:
Set-Price Selling – by Property Match (UK).

Posted by: Property Match (UK): The modern way to market houses

Clearly, in presenting a single 1 hour programme, looking for a positive outcome, even Mary Portas was going to find it difficult to delve into the intricacies and expose the plethora of less good practices in the complex world of estate agency.

She instead focussed on their ‘customer’ service – meaning the service as experienced by potential buyers. Lets be clear, the agents clients are the sellers, but their customers are the viewers, the buyers. She simply didn’t have time to start probing into agent-client relations and yet get a ‘positive’ and agreed game plan as the outcome.

People she asked before embarking on the production, openly felt that in their experience the estate agents they had dealt with had been slimy, manipulative, and grasping.

Her undercover enquiries suggested that on honesty stakes alone, estate agents were considered to be almost the worst in the country, beaten only by politicians currently! What she wanted to try and achieve instead, was a reputation amongst all estate agents for hard work, real knowledge about each property they sell, expertise, and honesty.

After all, sellers pay upwards of £5,000 and sometimes beyond £15,000 per completion for a service, which takes about 10 weeks for an average house sale.

She wanted the dirty tricks regime previously used to lure people into buying a house to be got rid of, for good.

At first, the firm of estate agents that took part in the programme were observed doing naughty things, for example, using photos that excluded obvious flaws in the property and including phrases in the sale particulars which were about as meaningless as a phrase could get, being designed to avoid stating anything negative about a house.

When challenged about this, the agent’s management explained that they were trying to do what the ‘vendor’ would want when compiling sales particulars. However, Mary identified where honesty was falling at the first hurdle, by taking this stance.

The agent’s management accepted this after a face to face meeting and agreed to modify the procedure for viewings and to trial some new sets of details showing things more genuinely.

She strongly suggested that if agents were unable to do this simple thing, people would be better off placing their properties on the Internet themselves! I happen to agree with this sentiment. It now remains to be seen whether, or not, estate agents can be honest and genuine in their descriptions and verbal explanations when showing viewers, (their real customers), around houses which they are considering purchasing.

She mooted that in essence, houses sell themselves, provided the right information is given during each viewing.
Without such improvements to the service being provided by estate agents, she thought that buyers, and sellers were currently being let down.

Having arranged for a refresher course on how to show people ‘houses’ at Kenwood House in North London, the penny appeared to drop. The very capable in-house sales team quickly grasped, the need to know fundamental information about each house and the need to be ready to explain it and answer any questions. Yes, its more work but it is essential; was the conclusion.

Up until then the agent’s management admitted they didn’t train their staff to do viewings! They later accepted that the need to do this was a fundamental requirement, both for the selling client and for all potential buyers.

Not only should the negotiator know everything about the property (including which way it faced relative to sunrise) but they should also be expected to know about the area, the schools, the level of crime, etc.. It was then agreed that extra information should also be provided in the sales particulars about such things.

It was accepted that if a buyer was being shown properties by an estate agent whom they felt they could trust, they’d be more likely to actually ‘listen’ to them.

Also, if the agent is seen to be genuinely interested in the individual features of the house when they go to value it initially, they’d get many more sales instructions.

The programme concluded that after making these simple but essential adjustments, the buyers who were interviewed about their experiences afterwards, all thought the agent accompanying them, seemed honest and trustworthy and had complete specialist knowledge about the property and its location.

The programme showed that their really IS an alternative way for estate agents to present their clients’ houses for sale on the housing market.

The next question has to be; will estate agents across the UK soon start offering such an improved level of service?

Any ideas, or comments please?

More on how we think a turn-around in the housing market may be quickly achieved:
Set-Price Selling – by Property Match (UK).

Posted by: Property Match (UK): The modern way to market houses – unless estate agents improve their ACT.

Having got control of selling the houses, they then hope to ensnare a few unsuspecting buyers with access to more cash and mortgage-raising ability than is good for them. They also hope for a tide of rising prices; which generally only comes every so often, of course.

By getting so many houses onto the market in this way, they are setting an unrealistic tone of both prices and timescales which cause many people to suffer much dissatisfaction and disappointment but estate agents are just business people and do not care about this. Huge numbers of failed attempts to sell houses are just forgotten and never surface in the press or media.

A small number of sales are successful and agents live from the fees earned from these transactions. Agents are used to working in such an atmosphere of scarcity and have been for decades.

We’re saying that duping people into selling in this way and offering free initial valuations into the bargain, is unfair and results in bad market outcomes for the majority. We argue for a change in the way agents take on new instructions to allow a more market-conscious breed of professional advisers to filter in and stimulate much more positive activity across the whole UK housing market. Fair prices for all and relatively quick and reliable sales would be the outcome. Who, amongst the house-owning community would NOT want that?

Posted by: Peter Hendry: Pioneering better ways of house-marketing

The government should now amend the Estate Agent Acts to give agents a responsibility to sell a house at, or near, the price they suggest it is worth.

If they fail, within a previously agreed timescale (say 3 months), the seller should have the option of requiring that agent to buy the property.

The agent, if they genuinely felt the property was worth what they advised it was, should be prepared to do this on the assumption that the house could be sold-on within a reasonable timescale.


In this situation there should be an even chance that the agent will make a profit on half of the properties s/he is required to buy in this way, and so this new provision would not, in itself, penalise a genuine agent.
The great benefit of enacting such legislation would be that the housing market would be unblocked. People would, at last, be able to move more frequently and more confidently.


An added benefit would be that the property market would remain open for business throughout changing economic cycles.

Lets look at some more advantages and disadvantages:

Agents should not loose out, if they are genuine. They would gain by increasing the throughput of houses being bought and sold throughout the whole year.


The seller should not loose but would gain by being able to move to another property, priced in an exactly similar way to the one he or she is selling.

The NET result of these measures would therefore be to smooth house prices by reducing the boom and bust scenarios we have become so familiar with in the housing market.


Even when the main economy is going into a downturn, the housing market could be insulated from the effects by using this method of pricing.


Similarly in an upturn, the housing market could be insulated from over-exuberant pricing by these methods, which would self-regulate the prices estate agents chalk-up.

Imposing this additional responsibility on estate agents would not be too onerous for them when considering that average fees for house sales equate to approximately 2%. Such fees would mean that after each 50 sales, a firm could afford to buy a property out of the commission recently earned. Assuming that valuations are reasonably accurate, this added responsibility would be entirely feasible from a business model viewpoint.

Looking at this pragmatically, if as already mentioned estate agents take about 2% average fee on each property sold, they could afford to pay for each 50th property outright: – from earned fees.
This suggests that if such a penalty for poor practice were to be imposed, the burden should only affect firms which over-price houses.

The financial burden imposed would in effect only be the difference between the market price of a property and the price wrongly suggested by an agent. Also, should the valuation turn out to be a correct one, the agent should not make a loss on the property they had been required to purchase from the client.

The effect on the housing market in general, would be to help the flow of properties being exchanged. Those vendors in chain situations would also gain, so there are considerable merits in the idea of making agents responsible to purchase properties that they fail to sell on the market within a reasonable time.

If ‘quality of price’ can work for firms like John Lewis, the same should apply to businesses like estate agents. Obviously, with estate agents, lower prices would need to apply as being the yardstick, not higher ones as at present.

Examples of current house-viewing experiences, illustrating the problem
I decided to view a couple of houses for sale with estate agents recently. What I found dismayed me.
One of the houses had been used for holiday lets for several years and was in extremely poor physical condition, few repairs having been carried out for a long time and those that had, had been badly executed.

The asking price was higher than that which any similar property in that location had ever sold for.

When asking the agent for information about what net income the property had achieved over recent years, I was promised the information but it was never provided. It was clear that not only had the income (or lack of it) been disregarded in arriving at the asking price, but that the house had been priced as if it were in pristine condition, no account being taken of the extensive and essential repairs awaiting any buyer. The price asked was obviously unreasonable, especially in the current more difficult market conditions.

I viewed a second house in the same road. This house was priced at a similar level but in this case the state of repair was about average. However, the size of this house was significantly smaller and the front garden, lying beyond the street frontage, had been sold off separately, unlike the other house which still came with its front garden.

The second house was being marketed by a different agent but neither of these factors were mentioned in the particulars, nor it would appear, taken into consideration in the price asked.

When checking the Land registry records it became clear that the second house had sold 7 years prior, and that the asking price now, was a full 62% more than the sale price then. According to the agent then, the value of this house had increased nearly 9% each year for the past 7 years in a row!
Clearly this cannot be correct. Something is amiss in their calculations.

During the feedback discussion also I asked this agent how long the property had been on the market. After a hesitation they said about a year. I then asked how many viewings had they conducted over that time. They could not be sure! I made the point that if relatively few viewings had taken place, the inference is that the price is too high, and is discouraging people from viewing the house.

Although these points were frankly discussed in the follow-up discussions after the viewing, no quarter was given by the the agent about the asking price.

These two recent experiences underline the problems facing buyers, as a result of the methods used by estate agents to market houses, even in what are undeniably, extremely tough market conditions.

No wonder agents are generally regarded with scant respect. The way they market houses needs substantial improvement.

Use of EPC inspectors to provide house-price guides (or valuations) to those planning to sell

The further proposals set out below need to be implemented in addition to those set out above for the regulation of how long agents need to allow for marketing houses, on behalf of their clients.

The following proposal is essential, as part of the process to stabilise house prices, at the point of sale. It is to require vendors to commission an open market valuation of their property at the same time as getting the EPC produced.


If all EPC inspectors were trained to, they could easily incorporate this work during their inspection.
Vendors (or agents) should be required to show the resultant figure alongside the asking price on the sales particulars.

This way, the burden of costs between vendors and purchasers would be evenly split, with the vendors having to pay something to get their house marketed as well as having a duty to price the property sensibly.
The purchasers would be responsible to pay to have building surveys of the house(s) they might be interested in buying as well as financing the mortgage valuation, the mortgage fees and possibly an independent house valuation, if necessary.

Having an EPC with a valuation, right at the outset, should encourage estate agents to do their market appraisals more accurately, which in turn would help buyers in the negotiating process.


This would greatly aid the operation of the housing market.

Such valuations could be used as a general guide for owners and agents when marketing individual properties.

The need for the Government to intervene in the workings of the housing market is clear. Its about providing individuals with better house price information. Armed with this, they could make better informed decisions about buying and selling residential property.

We therefore urge the Government to focus in on this area now that the Land Registry makes price information on all sales publicly available. There are opportunities to make better use of this information, starting with the way estate agents do market appraisals.

Leaving things to continue as they are, without agents providing accurate market valuations, is surely not an option in today’s world?

Posted by: Peter Hendry of Property Match (UK): The modern way to market houses

This means anyone can now put a house up for sale without first having to obtain a HIP.

However, Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) are still the responsibility of owners to provide and these remain mandatory. It is therefore important that these are ordered promptly by those putting houses up for sale. This is a European directive (a green initiative) so these cannot be abolished by a British parliament.

Some say abolishing HIPs puts all the trump cards back in the hands of owners and their estate agents – not such a brilliant thing after all?

For example, owners can put property up for sale without incurring any outlay (or hardly any). If they don’t like the amount offered by the buyers at the time, they can just pull the property from the market, without loosing anything.

The problem with this is it will slow the market down by forcing buyers to start looking all over again, having wasted their time deciding they liked a property that might never have been for sale at a reasonable price – in the first place.

Also, the information contained within HIP packs can result in a sale collapsing once it is made available. Only making it available late in the transaction process is a double whammy for buyers who would have no option but to re-consider their purchase, late in the process.

The likely effect of this will be, an increase in pricing houses at uncompetitive levels by vendors and/or their often ever-eager agents.

This therefore seems, on deeper examination, to be a retrograde step and possibly a rather foolhardy one. Shouldn’t the powers-that-be reconsider?

The matter should at least be the subject of detailed scrutiny before confirming the proposed cancellation.
You could argue that scrapping HIPs will bring back over-pricing, which will bring back inordinate delays in finding buyers. This will cause the market to stall, not recover.

Also, with the impending rise in CGT, many second-home owners are now selling off, bringing more properties onto the market without the need to scrap HIPs.

I’m saying all this in an effort to open the debate to retain any improvements to the housing market that have already been put into place (albeit by the outgoing government) and not to allow this to go back to where it was, once before.

Thoughts anyone?

[StraightTalker]

Negative equity is calculated by deducting the balance on the outstanding loan from the value of the asset.

In other words, it is basically the result of having made a bad investment decision.

Once this happens there are only two courses of action left open to the investor; as far as that particular investment is involved.
Either hang on and hope, or sell at a loss and move on, still owing the lender the amount of the negative equity.

This suggests that if large numbers of people in the country suddenly find themselves in negative equity because their houses have fallen in value, large numbers of people have received bad advice as regards whether or not they should have bought and if so, at what price.

This is not a good advertisement for estate agents, who are seen as being the front-line service when it comes to helping people to buy and move (even though it is technically the vendors that they should actually be advising and not buyers).

We at Property Match (UK) can offer a significantly better service to house owners by helping them to understand more precisely how to do market appraisals for themselves and then craft offers which are more savvy than many of the deals which have been finalized in the past few years.

People really need to be market savvy in order to get themselves out of negative equity, keep themselves out and avoid further problems in the future.

Using Property Match (UK) helps both buyers and sellers to achieve this but at far less cost than if using high street estate agents.

Its time for a big change, time to go direct with house moving, using the full power of the Internet. Each individual, whether buying or selling, should take control and be better informed when making financial decisions involving moving house.

Its not difficult, now that the World Wide Web is able to connect many of us in so many aspects of our daily lives.

Please take a look at our web site? You can also make a comment to contribute to the ongoing debate about the need for these important changes.

Property Match (UK): The modern way to market houses