Birthday Blues

I turned late thirty something this week (I know it’s hard to believe) with seemingly very little to celebrate.

The BBC News I woke to told me we the country was heading for recession, that house prices had dropped 2% in August alone and that the credit crunch had further still to bite – Happy Birthday!

Little wonder that by midday we had three buyers withdraw – that’s 15% of our pipeline. If you Imagine agents across the town and the country took the same sort of hit then August 27th saw literally thousands of house transactions collapse on the back of one savage news report.

Agents already desperately struggling to survive will have lost thousands of pounds of their potential income in a matter of hours and plunged in to further crisis. That is the power of the media. Frightening!

As usual there was little by the way of balance in the report. One major factor any agent will tell you is that August is always one of the two worst months of the year. Obviously with so many people on holiday the number of applicants out looking drops substantially and if you have fewer consumers for a product then the level of interest and hence prices tend to reduce. This means that historically August will have seen smaller increases or even negative price levels compared to other months.

Thankfully, some tough talking, common sense discussions and hard nosed negotiating saw us resurrect two of the deals. However, I suspect many individual agents will not have had the skills or the training to be able to make that happen and are probably one step closer to looking for an easier way to make a living. Maybe that’s actually a good thing for me, less competition etc, but I have plenty of sympathy because these are truly brutal conditions to survive in at present.

I’m naturally a ‘glass half full’ kind of chap. I’m consoling myself that despite the likelihood these testing times may well see me sprouting many more grey hairs by the time of my next birthday; it hasn’t seemed to do George Clooney any harm.