Ben Ayers

OK so I have a really heavy cold and as a consequence am probably a little more grouchy than usual but an email from an estate agent has really wound me up.

By way of background, for the last 6 months or so Nicola and I have been looking to buy a home a little bit further our of London. We’ve targetted Weybridge in Surrey because it’s near to her family and close to the M3 for mine. It’s also well connected to London Waterloo. Unfortunately for us, prices are massively inflated by the fact that Weybridge has a lot of wealthy bankers living in the area. Well, they were wealthy.

Anyway, we’ve signed up with lots of agents and despite the best efforts of a couple, we’ve been unable to find a vendor who would bite on a realistic offer for their property. We’re slightly baffled as we’ve not gone in at insultingly low prices - just those that we feel reflect the declining market.

So, six months into our fruitless task, I was today sent an email by the Manager of John D.Wood & Co. in Weybridge, Stephen Parsons. This is what it said:

As the property market is starting to enjoy a resurgence of confidence, we felt that it would be a good idea to circulate once again to all our buyers a fresh selection of the properties that we have available for sale in the area.

Our intention is to encourage activity right up until the last moment of 2008. We are keen to conduct as many viewings on our clients properties as we can before Christmas and would therefore ask you to please browse through the properties that we have attached in your price range and encourage you to come and view a selection.

Our staff here have an in depth knowledge of all of our available properties, and would be delighted to answer any questions that you may have on individual houses.

We look forward to hearing from you.

This email irked me for a number of reasons. Firstly, there is more than a whiff of desperation about the phrase ‘As the property market is starting to enjoy a resurgence of confidence’. I’m guessing Mr Parsons didn’t read the BBC news website this morning, which reported that the head of Barclays bank reckons house prices will fall in total by 30% - which means another 15% drop next year. I can’t recall seeing any good news about the housing market so I’d like to see what measure he is using to convince him of a ‘resurgence in confidence’. Has he, for example, seen a steep rise in the number of properties sold in his patch? If so, it would be great to see evidence. If not, I’d genuinely like to know where he’s getting his information.

Secondly, what irked me about the email was the fact that despite being billed as a ‘fresh selection of properties’ the one or two that would appeal to us have been knocking around for some time.

Thirdly, as hinted at above, the Word document we have been sent was so scattergun it was laughable. There was no attempt to provide relevant details of the kind of properties that would appeal to Nicola and I. Nor were there any links so that if we wanted more info we could be taken to a website and tempted further by pictures, floorplans or more basic details.

So, I’m afraid it’s back to the drawingboard for John D.Wood in Weybridge. Perhaps if they spent a little less time talking up the market and instead concentrated on targeting potential buyers with useful information they might actually see some confidence - and sales - return to the housing market.

In the meantime I’ll stick to Find a Property and Globrix.