The RICS’s gloomy housing market survey predictably triggered some ‘world about to end’ headlines.
The Telegraph reported it under the heading: “Housing market grinds to a halt as number of homes on market hits record low.”
Not to be outdone, Bloomberg carried the story under the headline: “London Housing in Deepest Slump Since the Financial Crisis” [the use of capital letters somehow managed to make it seem even worse].
However, the problem with these sorts of headlines is that they tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies.
Furthermore, not everyone agrees that housing supply has dried up to a new low, with 43 unsold properties on an agent’s books during March, according to the RICS.
According to the property website Home, which takes its data from portals including Rightmove and Zoopla, the low was actually reached some while ago.
Since then, the amount of available stock has been gradually creeping upwards – largely because of stock levels increasing in London.
Home says that the low was in January 2016, with 386,000 homes for sale; by March, the number had inched up to 413,000 – as we reported last week.
Doug Shephard, director of Home, continues to stick by his numbers.
He told us: “Stock levels are slowly growing overall after the low in January 2016. This is mainly due to the slowdown in the London market, coupled with an increase in supply in the capital region.
“We expect this trend to continue through the rest of 2017.”
The chart below may not make for the happiest of pictures. Inventory is a very long way short of ten years ago.
But, if nothing else, it provides a useful snapshot – and definitely one to watch.
There might be a bit of a short term discrepancy in numbers right now, there is a bit of a spring clean going on where some agencies are working quite hard to remove properties that somehow managed to have multiple reference numbers and duplicated entries.
A lot of the duplications have now been removed. Other than screen shot evidence no-one would know they had ever been there so one portal is now fairly representative of what is actually for sale, under offer or sold subject to contract.
It has been quite fascinating to see how different agencies have reacted to some of the stuff we have identified, some just got on and cleaned up their listings, some protested, worked with us and were then helped to understand what we had identified but the funniest reaction is the naughty child approach, stood there protesting their innocence, looking sheepish with cheeks covered in chocolate. Someone has eaten an entire packet of chocolate digestives, was it you?…… confident No. Are you sure? embarrassed No. You haven’t forgotten it was you? a quivering bottom lip says it all.
The good news is the deliberate stuff now stands out, causes of the innocent duplications have been identified and with possibly 95% of the manipulation under control it be comes very much easier to question the remaining activity. It isn’t my job to police what goes on from here forward but those who do have the power to regulate the industry have a crystal clear view of what is going on, by whom and encouragingly a determination you use the insights now available to them.
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Robert,
Has there been an indepenent evaluation of your system to confirm that the problems have all been ironed out?
It would appear to me that the method of using a process of elimination as a way of proving your systm is flawed. How do you know that an agent identified by your ststem is indeed doing something wrong or whether it is just that their software is behaving in a way that you have not anticipated as was the case earlier?
Are you sure that these duplicates that nobody has noticed are the cause of the disagreement between RICS and Doug Shepherd? Woudn’t tens of thousands of duplicates since January be noticed by owners and other agents?
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I’m not anserwing for Robert here – merely making observations.
“Has there been an indepenent evaluation of your system to confirm that the problems have all been ironed out?”
What “problems” are you referring to here? The above sentence suggests that it is Robert’s ‘system’ that has apparent problems – where is your evidence to this effect?
“How do you know that an agent identified by your ststem is indeed doing something wrong or whether it is just that their software is behaving in a way that you have not anticipated as was the case earlier?”
This is why and how you’re proving to all you are unequipped to seemingly champion the cause of the poor ickle Estate Agent with whom you’ve invested money. This is down to BASIC LEGAL REQUIREMENTS. An Agent is responsible for ALL their marketing material – however produced or disseminated. IF the material is incorrect, for whatever reason – then the Agent has to correct the problem or breach relevant Legislation. Whether it is an internal, external or outsourced issue is irrelevant, it is an issue which needs correcting or the Agent risks the consequences.
Blaming all on “a software issue” is not a ‘get out of jail’ card. And using software that is not fit for purpose is, at best, irresponsible management on the Agent’s part.
Allowing their multitude of clients to further fiddle with a flawed system just puts the final tick in the box.
Robert has listened to the industry and produced what was needed. What he has produced has been independently tested to death by people in the industry. It has also apparently ‘passed’ the scrutiny of those who now use its findings as reference or evidence.
So – just maybe he has nothing to answer here – to you; me or anyone other than his clients/subscribers, but I’m sure that if that is not the case you’ll be among the first to know.
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PeeBee,
The system used by Robert identified 50 top portal jugglers. I won’t name the one who worked with Richard but they appeared twice in the top 50 list and Richard confirmed in one of his tweets that this was indeed related to the software being used. The system had identified a false positive. This was because the designer had not anticipated how the Estate Agent’s software worked which is always going to be an issue.
As for independent testing ‘to death’, then how did the system identify a false positive if it had been tested to death? My concern is that the people using Richard’s system have been amazed at its powers and all the buzz words like “doppelganger” and “bat out of hell” and don’t realise the fundamental problem is that it’s only software doing what a programmer tells it to do. The data that that programmer decides to show the user is then analysed by a hunan which is the weakest part of the system.
The system requires independent testing by IT professionals, not Estate Agents or City Analysts or Trading Standards who are not qualified.
As for tracking a listing through from listing to completion, that also seems to be more ‘sales speak’ than an actual viable system. That is unless house numbers, flat numbers and post codes are known at listing time.
I know you don’t like it but these online agents put the power in the hands of the consumer and I don’t believe for a second that Trading Standards or any Court will make a decision against an agent who provides a useful low cost service to the public. If somebody has paid for their property to be listed then they should be entitled to take their property off the market, raise and lower prices etc. You can point to as many consumer protection laws as you want but in the end the consumer will get what they want which is a cheap way to sell their properties. There is one huge flaw when Estate Agents disingenuously try and invoke consumer protection laws to protect themselves and that is i) Rightmove do not say that a listing is new to market ii) it’s not really that important is it? What consumer is going to complain because they thought that listing labeled “newly added” was in fact not really newly added?
Also, there is always going to be a way to game the portals. How can Rightmove know whether a listing is in fact new? What does that actually mean anyway? It can only use the information at hand and people can change Estate Agents or even change the ownership entry at the land registry if Rightmove start using that.
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“I won’t name the one who worked with Richard but they appeared twice in the top 50 list and Richard confirmed…”
Richard? Richard who?
Just who the Hell is Richard in all this?
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“You can point to as many consumer protection laws as you want but in the end the consumer will get what they want…”
Thanks – you’ve just nailed it. “Consumer” as you put it, encompasses everyone involved in a transaction.
YOUR view – “Bu99er the ‘consumer’ – I’ll do what I want”
As a SELLER – that one sentence Sums up your entire stance on the matter perfectly.
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I have always been amazed at the mainstream media’s slavish adherence to RICS residential property pronouncements. I suppose it is because it has been going on for so long that any upcoming scribbler automatically assumes RICS is the fount of all knowledge in such matters and therefore perpetuates the practice.
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Could they (whoever “they” are) regionalise the volumes of property for sale?
Might be a clearer picture.
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We are able to provide; a day by day update, a date range or year to date are view of an agent’s patch.
Now most of the nonsense is cleared down and out of the way we are striding towards a clear and incorruptable view of agent performance from listing through to completion or withdrawn. How are some agents going to cope when their actual performance is shown to be wildly different to the claims they make in their adverts.
Full transparency looks like a genuine possibliity and that is when the tables get turned on people who genuinely don’t understand some of the legal obligations of a contracted estate agent.
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Robert,
Could you explain a little more how your system can track a property from listing to completion?
Looking at how you have explained your software before and what I see in the property portals I would say this would not be accurate. You say your system is independent of the portals so you will only have an address with no house number and no full postcode and in the case of appartments no appartment number. This would appear to me to be insufficient information to be comletely sure of a match when accessing the information at the Land Registry, Especially in the case of flats were there may be several lsted over a period of time. How would it be possible to identify which had completed aand which hadn’t?
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I always find it funny how the RICS expects everyone to listen. Their local surveyors don’t listen to the agents when clipping 6% off the sale price for no reason
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