News and Press releases

The hard sell: how solicitors and estate agents are coping with the harsh new realities of the property market

01/11/2010

Just a couple of years ago, property agents had it easy. With queues of would-be buyers lining up outside every home, clutching shiny mortgage promises and wearing a look of desperation, it was every inch a sellers’ market.

If a vendor couldn’t make a viewing, the agents hired the cheapest labour they could get their hands on – students – who pitched up, settled in on the floor of the living room with a well-thumbed copy of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and blithely ignored the eager househunters wandering about around them. The property still sold, usually within a few weeks.

Now, things have changed. Staff from the Edinburgh Solicitors’ Property Centre (ESPC), an umbrella body representing solicitors responsible for around 90 per cent of sales in the capital, have this month ventured from their cosy George Street showroom for the first time to run a series of roadshows aimed at kick-starting the flagging property market.

Estate agents tell of working longer days, staying in the office late and holding viewings at weekends on the whim of a prospective buyer in an effort to hang on to those few precious inquiries which are made.
Individual sellers are being forced to accept offers well below their asking price, while the few developers still building homes are offering increasingly generous incentives in an effort to win buyers.
“People are just having to accept that the price they get for their property will be chipped away at,” says Alexander, who runs his agency, DJ Alexander, from offices in Glasgow and Edinburgh. “People who have had an offer accepted are saying, ‘I’ve had the survey done now and the boiler’s quite old, so I’d like to take £1,000 off for that’
or, ‘There’s a small roof leak so I’d like another £1,000 off for that’. Whereas before sellers might take the attitude that if a sale wasn’t completed quickly and without any hassle, they’d just move on to the next nearest offer, those other offers just aren’t there now.”

He recalls a one-bedroom flat on Edinburgh’s Queen Street which was put on the market in January 2008 – and at a pricey £280,000, still attracted no fewer than 21 notes of interest.

“I think you’d struggle to even sell that at all now, never mind find a fight on your hands,” he says. “The problem is, it’s not that people aren’t wanting to move – the usual reasons are still there. It’s that there’s no money available for lending and people just can’t move.

First-time buyers bring liquidity to the market and free things up, but those first-time buyers are just not around at the moment.”

THE SCOTSMAN, 1 November 2010

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