You can tell things are really bad in the UK housing market when estate agents start blaming journalists for the downturn. Normally those who are hacks or house sellers share the moral foothills when it comes to public approval. In other words, the public dislike both groups. But now the estate agents are on the attack.
Take the agents' comments in the latest survey of the UK market by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, for instance. "Buyer confidence is very low due to the press," says Louis Rigby, an estate agent on Merseyside in north-west England. Ken Bird, a Yorkshire agent, claims: "Sales [are] falling month by month. The short-term outlook is much the same until negative news flow ceases." Paul Morris in rural Herefordshire is even more forthright: "Media continue to drive down an already depressed market."
Well that's put me in my place.
I thought the housing slowdown was caused by banks unwilling or unable to lend to each other, restricting funds to would-be buyers, and instilling a lack of confidence among the wider public.
But no, it appears to some estate agents – currently a very small minority, it has to be said – that the problem lies with journalists.
The most high-profile behaviour in this vein has come from Knight Frank, an estate agency selling homes at the middle and top end of the market. It recently gained notoriety for circulating a leaflet to some homes in Wandsworth, south London, suggesting the slowdown was a media invention that was not supported by reality. "If I skipped the news on the TV and binned the newspaper I would be thinking we were on for a stellar year," says the Knight Frank agent who wrote the leaflet.
He then suggests a recovery may possibly be just around the corner, painting a picture of an imminently booming market in which: "come September, an acute shortage of supply sets off a serious rally in purchasing activity".
Well, perhaps that Knight Frank agent will turn out to be right, although his view appears to be dismissed even within the company. Liam Bailey of the firm's research department disputes the September prediction saying: "We do not take the view that Wandsworth or any other market – other than super-prime – will suddenly recover to 'normal' levels in terms of sale volumes and shift into price growth." Knight Frank's press office disputes the slowdown is the fault of the media. A spokeswoman says the leaflet "should never have been written let alone circulated".
But the fact that an individual in a leading agency can criticise the media yet fail to mention the banking crisis underlying the housing slowdown is an insight into just how easy it is to be an estate agent in the UK's largely unregulated housing industry.
But not everyone is pinning the blame on journalists.
If there is a silver lining from the wretched and largely unexpected collapse of the UK housing market this year, it is that most estate agents are showing a wave of reality. This is doing their collective image a power of good given that, in recent years, their business has not been regarded by the public as being honest when it comes to "telling it as it is" about house prices.
Hamptons International, the agency owned by Emaar and selling homes across southern England, is simply telling the truth when spokesman Marc Goldberg says many sellers are "willing to accept a new price realism some 15 per cent below the market peak".
Savills, an estate agent operating across the UK, has also been brutally realistic in admitting its sales in central London fell 45 per cent in the first six months of the year, that prices were down 7.5 per cent and might fall by as much as 25 per cent by the end of 2009, and that overseas sales were beginning to be hit as well.
Marsh & Parsons, a London estate agency, is another realistic operation when it explains that many of its homes on sale have fallen in price by 15 per cent.
Telling the truth to the public and clients alike is not only professional but wins more business in the long term; people who buy and sell recognise a firm that is honest and forthright.
But suggesting the market may actually be better than it really is will simply backfire; would-be clients can distinguish between fantasy and reality, especially when it comes to buying or selling their biggest personal asset.
Mind you, if an estate agent gets found out inflating market prospects, he can always fall back on a hoary old excuse – he can just blame the journalists.
- Graham Norwood is a property correspondent for The Observer