Property AI Report
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?
00:13:44 · Matt Goddard
[00:13:44] S1: That's it, that's it. And in in the way that we've heard over time, trading standards, you know, we've we've we've had these changes, we've had to implement them CRMs to pass them on to the portals, and the portals display the actual costs, not just um how much how much the rent's going to be, but all the associate fees that people have to pay to move into a new property. The fact that a third are missing it, is that such a surprise? Uh, you know, especially when the the big portal has maybe got uh inaccurate fees on their website. But I think the the big interesting one this website um this website this week, other than uh the right move news was the government claiming that home buying reform uh reforms are going to actually save property firms 116 million a year. Um this came up in a couple of articles, didn't it, Mel? And what do you make of it?
00:14:28 · Mal McCallion
[00:14:28] S0: Yeah, we were trying to do some calculations before we came on there, not very successfully, about actually how many what what that meant for each individual property business. So it is, we think the late hundreds, low thousands perhaps per business. But yeah, you know, look, anything like this is kind of welcome in terms of uh being able to uh yeah to see something that is going to help agents to and other property professionals and clean conveyances to to keep more of their money. And yeah, you know, the home buying process clearly needs some kind of overhaul. The fact that they are trying to grasp it is is positive, hoping that you know everybody involved who is you know getting together and building these things out and build something that you know just looks like Scotland, right? Just do that. It's up there.
00:15:11 · Matt Goddard
[00:15:11] S1: It's really easy. It's it's 116 million seems to almost global, if doesn't it? Like if we take roughly uh 24,000 estate agencies in the UK, that's 5,000 uh pounds a year saving. That doesn't seem enough if you think about the the sort of heads that you have in the business, moving paperwork around, following up on these things, dealing with fall-throughs, dealing with what is it now, 16-week chains. Um and and if you take another government figure, um the private rented sector database, which got launched and is rolling out at the moment, it's 65 quid a year to register a property. That means it's around about 327 million a year the government's gonna make through those registrations. And then on the other hand, it's saying actually we're gonna make half of that saving for you property firms through changing this. So maybe it's it's more like the different departments aren't conferring over the the impact of this, or they are purposely lowballing it so they can say in the future, ta-da, look what we've done. Yeah. Or maybe just the fact they don't think they're actually gonna be able to roll this out and don't want to put too big a figure on it, albeit 116 million is quite a decent figure, right? But maybe their mass is bad as ours.
00:16:16 · Mal McCallion
[00:16:16] S0: So yeah, I'd like you, I'm kind of thinking that the actual staff costs, you know, of actually chasing all this stuff is huge. Um, the you know, the full th the increased fall through is because over time, inevitably more fall through the longer it goes on. So if you constantly are up, then you know less fall through. So yeah, I'd I'd probably think they could have been a little bit more aggressive in terms of what those savings were, but uh, but yes, we shall see whether whether and when these alleged savings actually arrive. All right, that is our uh properties this week. Um let us move on to our 100th AI and tech news. All right, there's only really one story in AI tech news, although we will do two others, and that's about Black October, as we are now calling it. This is when essentially last week, PHP, which is a programming language, um, a kind of catastrophic flaw was found by AI in everything that's got PHP associated with it, which is something like 70% of um of the entire internet is is built on, or at least has a piece of this um this particular coding in it. So it started to kind of ripple, didn't it? Sort of on Tuesday. I started to see some sites go down and Google Cloud went down, and then all the way through Wednesday and Thursday, various others. Matt, from your um vast knowledge, what's what's been happening here? Um yeah, what's uh what's gonna happen?