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Estate agents should offer a NEW service and start advising both buyers and sellers
Why? Because the housing market is in stagnation, just at the time when more activity within it is most needed.
Since estate agents won't do it voluntarily, our Government needs to introduce these new measures to the housing market, says Peter Hendry, a Housing Valuation Consultant working at Property Match (UK), a new online-only property marketing web site.
He suggests that ‘the whole way’ houses are marketed by estate agents needs to change and that the change is now long over-due. “However, doing this involves agents doing a bit of hard work instead of simply taking the historical easy path,” he says.
"By this I mean that as well as trying to get the best price when selling your house, why don't the estate agents also help people to secure the house they want to buy next, at a similar market price," says Peter.
He believes that doing this would allow the market to flourish again and would overcome its current state of stagnation.
“The way this would be achieved effectively, would be to match buying and selling prices more appropriately,” he says.
At the end of the day, the price you get should be in line with the price you pay, after taking into account differences between the houses and their different locations of course. As soon as that starts to happen, the Great British housing market will start to flourish once again.
"People not only need the right roofs over their heads, they also need estate agents to provide even-handed and mature marketing services, whatever economic circumstances may prevail at the time. Even handedness is now desperately needed and a combined service of selling and buying would be an absolute first for Britain," says Peter.
He forecasts that if agents can't or won’t provide that, the only alternative left will be for owners to market what they would like to sell direct online and for buyers to view the houses, and then make offers direct - without having to keep resorting to what is currently well-accepted as the broken service of estate agency.
Ideally, this needs a relaxation of the red tape currently surrounding estate agency law, to open up more competition by new Internet marketing ventures and only the Government can implement that relaxation of course. Doing so would bring tremendous opportunities for estate agents to improve their services too.
“It is time to repair and enhance ‘house marketing’ by bringing in new business models, to improve upon what estate agents can currently offer people today,” says Peter.
For more detail on this story, please read Press Release Expanded.
For further information about the solutions now available to the UK housing market, please see both the Property Match Blog and see our Asking Prices advice page for anyone considering advertising online direct.
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