I don’t mean it really, if you do discount then you aren’t a dummy, I just wanted to get your attention. I am however tempted to email images like this one to potential new clients when they do question my fees and you should feel the same way, and hopefully get to a point where like me, you politely decline to reduce your fees and enter into that race to the bottom where no one wins, least of all the person or company making request in the first place. So why do people do it

It’s a common question from clients when they are looking to get a third party to write their companies blog for them. What do I advise and why? Mass produced and sold to everyone, or custom made and yours alone? The choice is stark, to be frank white label blogs are short and cheap, whereas bespoke blogs are priced according to the length and complexity, and ultimately driven by how long they take to source content and create. So, I can understand why some companies would g

A look at the recent calls for an SDLT extension as a test case for how the methodology of negotiation has a direct bearing on the outcome.

The Road of Yellow Bricks in the 1900 book, or the renamed the Yellow Brick Road in the MGM musical of 1939 starring Judy Garland, had many allegories that grew from its’ part in the story. One central theme that seemed to run through all of them was that the road represented an individual path for those that chose to set out on it. The road had many forks and crossroads, many choices to be made as to which direction to go in, and only those on the road were capable of making

Benjamin Franklin once famously penned, “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes” and probably no more fitting at the present time during a pandemic where everyone faces one or the other by the time this is all over. Death or higher taxes that is. The Chancellor would have spent much of the last nine months laying awake at night considering how he was going to fill the current £300bn hole that has appeared in the public finances, and significan

In writing this I had constant image in my mind of the scene from the jungle book with Kaa the hypnotic snake and Mowgli, where she hypnotises him and he falls into a trance ready to do his bidding like rushing out and buy a new hut in the jungle perhaps. That obviously didn’t happen, but it feels like that’s what the Chancellor has done to the buying public with the introduction of the stamp duty holiday, as I couldn’t fathom why in early November I am still seeing reports o

Last month the government launched yet another consultation, this time into, “Improving the Energy Performance of Privately Rented Homes in England and Wales” which until recent days stayed completely under the radar, partly as the government had as usual not trumpeted its' arrival as they knew what lurked within, partly because no one had read it, and partly because we have all been preoccupied with the pandemic. A copy of the consultation can be found here. It is only this

The Fleur-de-lis is historically associated with everything to do with France and was widely used by the French Catholic Church, French royalty and in heraldry. A 13th century poem about a golden lily that signified purity created the symbol we all know today. More recently it was adopted by Lord Baden Powell in 1907 when he formed the Scouts in the UK, whose moto became “Be Prepared”, explaining “you are always in a state of readiness…”. It seems appropriate for us all to

Dating back to the 1980s, when most owners and directors of estate agency started out in the industry their focus was Residential Sales – servicing the needs of people who wanted to buy and sell property. Transactional based estate agency in a pre-digital world. Someone wanted to buy and/or sell a property, their details and that of any deals was recorded in a folder on bits of paper. When the deal completed, this folder usually went into archive boxes in the basement never t

You often hear the use of Section 21 of the 1988 Housing Act described as a “No Fault” eviction, where tenants are evicted from their homes without reason, without being at fault for anything in particular. Many lobbyists, mainly Left Wing, have continually campaigned to have it removed and until about 2015, their cries had fallen on deaf ears, but as I write today, times have been slowly changing as Bob Dylan once crowed, and the government is sleep walking into a disaster t

In history the imagery that seems to lend itself most readily to indecision, to swaying one way or another whilst deciding which way to go is the one of the angel and the devil pulling in opposite directions, both trying to influence the decision maker. The decision often taken is to do nothing, as the power of both cancel each other out. This pictorial conflict dates back to AD 590 when Pope Gregory released a list of seven deadly sins which were to be avoided at all costs,

Stamp duty holidays are always welcomed by just about every stakeholder involved, especially of course potential buyers as they have this aura of free cash, almost as if like in a Hollywood movie, something blows up and dollar bills come floating out of the sky and everyone rushes into the street to pick them up. That’s strangely how it makes people feel, like lottery winners, and their behaviour suddenly becomes conditioned accordingly, which is precisely what the Chancellor

As the lockdown restrictions started to be lifted last week the government placed estate agency and lettings agency business owners at the front of the queue of industry leaders who have been given the opportunity to revitalise their businesses and get back to work. Sounds great, that is after all what they had been crying out for. However, the new normal as it is being called is a far more difficult place to exist in than the one first considered maybe a few weeks ago when t

What I have noticed recently is no consultants or businesses have been openly discussing the need to prepare for a second and possibly third lockdown, but only planning to emerge from the current one, as if one was all there was going to be and after which society was simply going to make a progressive transition back to normal life using social distancing. Perhaps they think that future lockdowns will be much later on and they can be planned for nearer the time. It seems to

In the 15th Century, very detailed records were kept in ink by quill in papyrus ledgers, stacked in rows on heavy wooden shelves containing all the necessary information documenting critical events or parts of their business. Today we have the luxury of the digital world, the cloud, voice recording and other advancements that mean we don’t need paper or physical records anymore, but in a way that can make being compliant even more difficult, to measure the robustness and comp

Can I sell my property at the moment? Should I try and sell my property if I need to move? Probably the two questions in the property industry forums and articles that I have seen the most frequently since the lockdown started nearly 4 weeks ago, and two that in context no one has ever needed to ask before. After all, the government has never officially suspended the housing market, and the range of answers has prompted me to offer an independent view to those who might be lo

I am minded writing this piece as some old advice has been starkly reminded to me by recent events and the commentary surrounding them. When I was a young man, who I consider now to be one of my past mentors now, an ex’s father as it happens, advised me to only believe half of what I read and nothing that I heard. I understand now this was an adaptation from Edgar Allan Poe’s “believe half of what you see and nothing of what you hear”. At the time we were discussing an articl

I don’t know about anyone else, but when actively running a business, involved in the everyday detail, spending time with clients, staff, customers, suppliers, peers I used to do so with one eye looking over my proverbial shoulder at my “To Do List” (TDL). In my eyes a calculation was being made, “Is it getting longer, have I managed to take even one thing off the list today?” I used to calibrate its size by how long it would take me to cleanse it, 3 months I reckoned, but I

Spring is on the horizon, traditionally a time of year when many people look to put their property on the market. In doing so, a lot of sellers ask about the merits of what has become known as property staging, and it’s the most frequent enquiry I get from them. Initial questions focus on what is it, how much does it cost, is it worth it, does it work? Secondary ones look for reasons not to do it. Can’t buyers see that, isn’t it obvious, isn’t that going overboard? Of the 10

There has been a lot of discussion in the last 12-24 months or so about the rise of the online estate agencies, the nemesis of traditional estate agencies with an office on their local high street who better watch out as this new dawn of proptech could be their undoing. For the consumer it must be quite confusing, as propaganda from each side of the argument tends to focus on the failings of the other as opposed to the benefits of their own service or product, so who to belie