THERE'S a surprising lack of consensus among the experts, from rent-a-quote pundits to globally recognised economists, as to the gravity of the economy's woes.
But if a real financial crisis has one virtue, it's that it has a useful habit of separating the wheat from the chaff in the financial services world.
In the past two weeks alone, seven mortgage brokers have been banned by the Financial Services
Authority (FSA). In most cases they have been guilty of mortgage fraud – or more specifically, submitting false mortgage applications.
They've only been banned from regulated business, however, so some may engineer a career change and become estate agents.
It's astonishing that, while independent financial advisers and mortgage brokers, among others, are subject to increasingly stringent FSA regulation, estate agents and letting agents are negatively licensed. Under this form of authority, anyone can set up in business without qualifications or any other permission and the Office of Fair Trading's powers are limited to banning them only when their conduct is deemed to be unfit and improper.
Estate agents are not formally regulated or required to hold formal qualifications. You might hope that, in a market where prices are falling, mortgage supply is constricted and buyers are thin on the ground, estate agents would have all the incentive they need to provide a decent service.
But in too many cases, competence is a step too far. A good friend of mine in Glasgow has discovered this the hard way recently. The litany of errors would be funny if it hadn't cost him valuable time and money. We're talking simple details here, such as getting the address right and telling potential buyers the correct price and whether it's fixed or offers over. More than a dozen viewings later it became obvious that the would-be buyers viewing the flat had been fed a pack of lies by the estate agent. While this particular agent is clearly not representative of estate agents in Scotland, there's enough anecdotal evidence around to suggest that it isn't an exception either.
Hopefully, the current crisis is performing a sort of natural regulation. There are some good estate agents around who suffer unfairly from their association with the cowboys of the trade. Now the queue of buyers has dried up, it's no longer enough to stick a sign up outside a place, show some people around and rely on sheer demand to get rid of it. In a saner housing market, professional agents offering competence, good service and support should, in theory, prove the most durable.
Ideally they would be the long-term beneficiaries of the credit crunch, with the sub-standard operators weeded out. Unfortunately it doesn't always work that way. The housing market needs buyers to be more confident, but a lack of trusts in estate agents is a barrier to that and regulation can't come too soon.
IF A report published yesterday by the UK's biggest energy firm, Centrica, is accurate, gas bills could reach an average £1,000 in the next few years – 60 per cent higher than their current level. Energy costs have been rising for some time and are already having a ruinous affect on the household finances of pensioners in particular. While Centrica's prediction is not surprising – and it's probably laying the ground for imminent price rises – the prospect of bills reaching that level in the relatively near future means energy usage will need to be taken far more seriously than it currently is. Steps such as turning the thermostat down 1C are straightforward and can make a notable difference to the bottom line, but relatively few households do it. In time, that's the very least that'll be required and rising costs will herald a very real change in energy use behaviour.
The full article contains 641 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
