Mighty Homes

As the property market is tightening not due to a lack of demand for UK houses but for a lack of available finance and credit. About four months ago you could find many 5 times your salary one of the fastest growing areas of the mortgage market. Now you can find only one and no doubt it will soon be none. With egg removing their credit card facilities from 7% of its customers as one example and banks generally reviewing all there lending criteria it is self evident we are in the mist of a fiscal tightening for many households.

I personally have had my bank calling far more regularly than normal asking if they can review my accounts and help with my heavily laden credit card. The wife just won’t leave it alone! Friends have had to pull out of there intended property purchase as the mortgage offer has expired and now they cant get a new deal on the same terms from the same lenders. So now as all of us may well find more and more we know of friend’s colleagues and acquaintances that have personally started to suffer from the disease called credit crunch.  The choice becomes simple find a cheaper house offer less for the one you want or stays were you are. You cant afford more than you can borrow!!

Interest rate reductions are difficult to pass on to consumers as banks are being charged more to borrow themselves as they find their own credit rating being reduced. Like any market when demand is high and supply is low prices rise and the banks don’t escape this fact either. So will it continue well in all likelihood it will in the short term I guess until all the facts are believed to be out and no more bank shocks like the rock are set to appear then will supply of funds start to increase.

Estate agency is one industry that will start to feel the effect quickly with some already starting redundancies in preparation for a tough market Reeds Rains announced last week 100 jobs were to go others may follow suit shortly, is my guess.The agents who follow up every email lead every enquiry and every bit of marketing exposure they can find will come out victorious leaner and fitter than before. As I truly believe the demand is still there just waiting for the finance to flow.

In the mean time some good news for estate agents the world of property marketing is changing away from the expensive portals to property search engines like mightyhomes who have just gone one stage further and launched a free to list directory of estate agents , even property on Face  If this medium takes a grip which I believe it will due to increased inventiveness by these enterprises due to the fact they don’t rely on traditional advertising fees from agents but instead rely on the traffic they create.

Mike Barrow

We are now in the process of creating a directory of estate agents in the uk . The aim is to provide a email service allowing house hunters the ability to email multiple estate agents in their area in one go, visit each agents website directly and quickly search the mightyhomes site to search for homes for sale. We surrently have just under 14000 agents in the database and are currently working on the accuarcy of it. We expect shortly to bring it out of beta, Surveyors and removal firms are also on the cards and coming soon.

Having recently watched the recent program from ITV on the state of the UK housing market, it would appear at first glance that UK property for sale is facing disaster! If you’re a seller of a property ouch and if you’re a buyer wait as homes in the UK will be 30% cheaper in the next few years.  Then the Daily mail newspaper I spotted amongst others run a series of articles headlining with detached homes falling by £278 a day. Taking the ITV’s program for example all the doom and gloom predictions were by people who have sold there house homes or flat and are in rented, not exactly unbiased opinions to my mind.

  But if enough people repeatedly see and believe and take this type of information as their own opinion then yes I would say the media does have an influence on the market. Then estate agents usually start to react to sentiment  in order to achieve a sale and start lowering valuations and rightly so they are the true bastions of the property market in my opinion.   

Having spoke to a number of estate agents indeed the market has tightened they all said buyers were out there but just not making any moves this appears to be the same for property auctions with many properties not reaching reserve prices. The auctions i have been to recently are still well attended but bidders are behaving more cautiously. And indeed the days when property is sold just by the agent’s front door being open may well be gone and in these time every piece of property marketing with play an important role in riding the storm we appear to be heading into. I have a sneaky feeling that things are not as bad as the media would have us believe. If you remember 2004 we had the same predictions made and I myself took it in, and sold an apartment at a £16,000 loss only to find 2 years later it would have been a 16,000 profit!

  Factors that may support the property market 

 1) 1 in every 15 homes in the UK are occupied by immigrants working in the UK and rising at a progressive rate according to Joanne Roney of Sheffield city council, mainly in the lower end of the market and many being owned by private landlords. This in its self will have a supporting role to this sector of the market.

2) In the 90’s the period the property market currently being compared to interest rates were 16% now they are 5.25% big difference. 3) Unlike the credit crunch of the early 1990s, when homeowners had the fiscal life squeezed out of them by high interest rates and unemployment, this time it seems the young are in the firing line. The older more financially established sector of the market seems to remain relatively unaffected.
InIn conclusion I think we are in and initial panic that will settle down to a flat market but not an aggressively falling market. So maybe sellers shouldn’t panic too much just yet. And buyers don’t wait on out in the hope of rock bottom prices. Do a good deal take advantage maybe of sellers panic if you need to own a new or first home. At the end of your day its your home and you can’t take a brick down the pub to buy your round so does it really matter if the price of your home move up and down through the years. Just make sure it’s affordable.
Mike Barrow This article is open to re use. Out of courtesy please include text links.

Its one nil to first time buyers!!!!!!

I am really pleased to report that I have just received an email from a couple that have just bought their first home at auction having approached the property auctioneers after the auction and struck a deal. So congratulations Richard and Lisa well done. And I am pleased my ramblings helped and please keep in touch.

The new property auction season starts again mostly towards the end of this month and early February and from looking at some of the auction property for sale it looks like numbers are up again. You can also find auction property and  property suitable for development on the mightyhomes site. Choose a location and your area of interest from the investment filters. As you can probably tell this is one of my favourite features of the site. Happy bidding 

Mike Barrow

mightyhomes

The time may just be right for first time buyers to start winning the competition for property and get themselves on the property ladder

There are just 28,000 properties out of 700,000 for sale in the property websites Mighty Homes database that are described by estate agents as ideal for first time buyers just 4%. Over 70% of these properties are also described as suitable Buy to Let investments!

With as many as 350,000 Brits owning a second home in the UK, it’s not hard to see how the vicious circle is created. Property investors compete with first time buyers to purchase property creating more pressure to supply than any other section of the market.

But now it may just be the time for first time buyers to strike back. With the housing market stagnating and interest rate direction remaining uncertain the least motivated of these two buyers should be property investors. With sellers taking on average double the time to sell their property than at the start of the year, sellers and agents may just be glad of any offer made by that ready to go first time buyer.

James Tout from Mighty Homes commented “Having recently visited 12 property auctions in the last month nearly 50% of properties have struggled to meet reserve prices and remain unsold. This represents a clear opportunity for first time buyers to take advantage particularly if they don’t mind a bit of DIY.”

“First time buyers should find and research a few properties of interest, a good place to start is mightyhomes.co.uk  with some unique search features to aid in finding auction and renovation property.

“Go along to the auction and if you don’t want to bid and be bound by the terms of an auction sale just wait and see if a property doesn’t meet its reserve price. Approach the auction house and see if the seller will take an offer from you. In most cases they will as why else would you sell a property at auction?”

“There are also increasing numbers of property investors selling parts of their portfolios at auction therefore increasing supply, in some cases recently bought apartments are taking big hits as investors are forced to accept far lower prices than the inflated prices they paid in some reported cases up to 30%.

Good Luck  mightyhomes

As promised we will now look a little further into the challenges that face any Property Search Engine.

So you want to create a property search engine no problem get your self a crawler/extraction program target agency websites and fill a database. Hey presto you think!!

Then you realise there’s something like 4500 to 5000 estate agency websites out there all written differently. Does your crawler have the ability to deal with each site’s different styles of form filling, option selecting, button pressing does it learn the results pages picking out the parts and interpret the property features your users need? And then you realise the details of each property can change at a moments notice so you have to completely refresh your database. A day is a long time in the property market anything less than 24hrs just won’t do. Do you think estate agents will stand for anything less. As far as their concerned a dissatisfied property owner seeing his property advertised at the wrong price is bad for business, and rightly so.

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Ok so you’ve got that far. So now you’ve got a database full of properties for sale, addresses, picture descriptions and prices refreshed every 24hrs Hey Presto! Your user searches for Chester. Away your database goes and returns all result with Chester in the address field. There is something like 21 locations in the UK with Chester in them not to mention all the connotations of Chester appearing in the road names!

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Ok you’ve got that far Then you realise that estate agents all write addresses differently  some use full addresses some use just maybe a village name within Chester say Hoole even abbreviate the addresses ! So now you’re either missing a large % of properties in the sub towns of Chester and displaying irrelevant properties from the other 21 UK locations, oh and streets with chester in them. Your user gives up and leaves. This also creates the problem of accurately using mapping functionality. I know we will extract the postcode for each property from the target sites location map!! Then you realise about 40% of agency sites just don’t have this functionality. MMM. I know we will display the highest relevance to a users search first. Then your user gets past the first few pages and the results get less and less relevant. MMM.

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Before starting out we commissioned an independent survey to find what key features are most important to property hunters when using a property website. Surprisingly to us we found that displaying properties in price order ranks in the top 5 criteria for user functionality. This in itself compounds the difficulty in highest relevance first.  

In Conclusion

The main challenge to any property search engine is not filling a database with the greatest number of properties challenging the likes of RightMove for content size and refreshing it fast enough to keep estate agents happy. The real challenge is displaying to your user the greatest % of your database accurately for their search criteria in price order. Were still mastering this everyday and at the moment are determining 94.6% of properties postcode locations with around a 95% degree of accuracy. This we hope will stand us in good stead in the battle to show the most and highest relevance properties for sale to a users individual search criteria. Once you know a postcode the rest is easy! The trickery comes next!   

 

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