00:06:24 · Mal McCallion, Matt Goddard
That the impact, like I said, over time can be significantly cumulative, you know, to the benefit of right move and to the detriment of pretty much everybody else in the industry, because consumers do make decisions based on these things. You know, this is Google, this is where you go and you you say properties for sale in you know, Basing Stoke, and it comes up and says 900,000 properties um for sale, and that is wrong and not true, and has not been true for a long, long time. [00:06:52] S1: And if you look at their you do think this is maybe something sort of uh for a better word, sort of considered rather than like a marketing intern who's maybe tweaked it and then someone's brought up in a following marketing meeting months later and gone, oh, why have we not got that? And then popped it back in again without without thinking that we removed it because of this unsubstantiated claim at some point.
00:07:15 · Mal McCallion
[00:07:15] S0: I think that's what they want you to believe. I think you know that the statement yesterday was very much hand-wavy, kind of like, yeah, you know, just one of those things, blah. But actually it it's not one of those things. This is 16 years of of a claim being made. It's a marketing claim, and it's one, you know, that has to be true. Because, you know, we would if we were all going around lying about you know what we actually have on our sites or volumes or discounts or freeze or anything like that, there are rules out there and very serious rules for very serious reasons. You know, I wrote an article on the Model Prop blog uh on Sunday um about kind of um how that there are some you know echoes of of the Man City case, right? And again, you know, without over-dramatising or over-ally allying it, you know, essentially for actually the same 16 years, um the city essentially was putting more money into their business allegedly. Well, actually, it's been they have been found by the Premier League to have been doing this, they are now um uh they are appealing against that, and the the decision is due in the next couple of months. Everybody else suffered. If this is true and it did proven to be true through the Court of Appeal, then yet Stoke didn't win the FA Cup back in 2011. You know, you had Sunderland that missed out on the League Cup, whatever it was, these are material impacts. You know, Harry Kane won the ballon d'or last night, congratulations to him, but he didn't win the league when he finished second to Lan City, whenever it was in the 2010s. So, you know, there is huge, huge, huge impacts all the way along, and obviously the counterfactuals, nobody can ever kind of go back and say, well, this is exactly what happened. However, what would that mean for on the market? You know, what would that mean for Super? What would that mean for the state agents who have gone out of business because they can't afford Ride Move fees or have seen their business heavily impacted because you know, Ride Move is is able to charge a significant amount more that they couldn't afford, so they couldn't be on it, so they haven't won instructions.
00:09:00 · Mal McCallion
So again, you know, I don't I don't want to over-dramatize it, but at the same time, I think it's really, really important that we kind of treat it as seriously as it should be treated, which is this is a business that has made 70% margins based on people believing that they had more properties than they did. Every time they went on to Google search for uh properties for sale, Zuba didn't come up saying 900,000, right move did, and that wasn't true. And there does seem to be this kind of weird change where they they they took it off the homepage back in 2021, they took it off the other pages last year and then put it back on again um a month later. And if you look at their um their financial reporting, then they are quite open about the fact that that these these properties weren't all there. So, you know, it is incumbent on them to make sure that these things are true and that these things are right, as is incumbent on all of us. We all have to abide by these rules. And then even yesterday, actually, if you went on to to Right News website, and again, kind of you know, this is something that you know it is is mind-blowing, that they still had a 900,000 claim on their new homes page. You know, so actually we've got 900,000 new homes um out there. So, you know, again, this is not the behaviour of a business that is, you know, the the that it's that should be the number one in their particular market, that should be, you know, absolutely clean and all that sort of stuff. Feels like there is there are there are many questions that they still have to answer. And just kind of waving it away and saying, well, you know, it's just old views, blah, blah, I just don't think that don't think really cuts it. So yeah, look, um, I'm sure that um, in fact, I'm I'm certain that over the coming days there'll be more that that kind of comes out about this. Um, but yes, you know, just in terms of of of our conversation, you know, the fact that um that that they they still had those um 900,000 on there, the fact that there was this change, um, I think are are really serious questions that that that they should be uh that should be put to them and they should be should be made to answer, in my view. All right, that is what we're going to call uh here the white roof scandal for this week. Um let's move on to um other property news.
00:10:53 · Mal McCallion
So we have some interesting stuff about lettings here. So rent in advance ban has caused problems for many tenants. Now, I'm almost certain that uh way back in the day we spoke about the potential for um people not being able to pay rent in advance and causing some significant problems for those who perhaps haven't got you know all of their stuff together, people from abroad, etc. So, yeah, just flesh out this story for us.
00:11:14 · Matt Goddard
[00:11:14] S1: No, absolutely. So um I think good examples of it were um maybe less affluent tenants um wouldn't pass their credit checks necessarily. Maybe one regular one that we had specifically at Fopston's was overseas um tenants or overseas students coming along and um not having the the credit rating they needed to, so maybe they'd pay six months in advance to prove that they had did have the resources to cover it and therefore by a pain up front effectively doing that. And um with the change with the change for the Renters Rights Act, obviously that got got removed and unsurprisingly, as you sort of say, it's it's now causing problems for many tenants who who would have been able to take those those tenancies and and deal with that now. Um so it's a knock on effect that I guess the the industry sort of called out well in advance and got people like Teresa Wallace and the Lettings Industry Council who were lobbying it far in advance and continue to lobby now against, or or at least not against, that's the wrong word, to work with and help shape some of these these changes. Because there are a lot of positives in it, right? But it's just the way it's enacted um that maybe hasn't impacted it in the way they'd want. But two um two lettings chiefs have come out, one from Leaders Roman's group, to say, surprise, this this is having a detrimental effect on these tenants. And it's ultimately the tenants don't see it as being something that the government's changed, see it as being the agents and landlords being a pain in the backside.
00:12:36 · Mal McCallion
[00:12:36] S0: Just just rules for rules' sake, exactly. I've got the money here, why can't I just put it in and pay up front? So, yeah, no, I I think you're right. It's another one of those kind of consequences of of big legislation. You know, as you said, we were talking last week about some some of the benefits. You know, actually, landlords are using nettings agents more because the rules are so complicated that they need them to make sense of it. But yes, that that there are these other knock-on effects that, to your point, appear to be agents just being immovable and annoying when actually there is solid legislation behind it. So yeah, one hopes that this is one of those where the government looks at it again and goes, Well, yeah, that there's always things that we need to tweak after we've seen it in place. And actually they just kind of say, Well, look, self-evidently, this isn't a problem in terms of people being able to pay up front. It's actually, you know, that there must be a way around this. But yeah, it is a um yes, something that that is causing the problems for for legitimate tenants and also stopping you know a lot of um kind of competition for for from individual places as well. Um, all right. Next up, um, we as we were talking a bit a little bit earlier on about fees missing from a third of letting's agents' websites. Matt, more, yeah, just kind of making sure that people are doing what they should be doing, right?