We've been here before. News that this week's better-than-expected unemployment figures have been caused largely by a surge in the recruitment of estate agents will prompt understandable fears of a return to the 1990s and early 2000s - and that plague of sharp-elbowed young salesmen and women in questionable suits who chased commissions and talked up the property market until the bubble burst.
There have been 77,000 jobs created in the past 12 months in the "real-estate sector", as it now prefers to call itself in an effort to live down a slightly seedy past, with 25,000 taken on in the last three months alone. The reasons are obvious. Property prices are finally once more on the up, after falling 16.6 per cent nationwide during the prolonged recession that hit estate agents as hard as any trader on the high street.
The combination of a return to economic growth, continuing very low interest rates, and a taxpayer-subsidised Help-to-Buy scheme are all fuelling the fire. For all its talk of the need to "re-balance" the economy by boosting manufacturing, the Government seems intent on making us a nation of estate agents rather than shopkeepers and factory owners.
This week, the London-based Foxtons chain, well-known for its brash sales folk ("Foxtons is based on a work-hard, play-hard ethic," its website boasts), offices that look more like cinema foyers and its fleet of highly decorated Mini Coopers, announced that its forthcoming £600 million stock market flotation is over-subscribed, with investors showing no sign of being worried about the property market overheating. Back in March, Countrywide, Britain's biggest estate agency (with 46 high-street brands, including Bairstow Eves and Hamptons), floated at the top end of City expectations.
Again, this has a familiar ring, only back in the 1990s it was banks and building societies, such as Lloyds, Nationwide and the Halifax, that were paying over the odds to gobble up small, independent estate agency chains, only to rush to dispose of them at a loss a decade later when the market turned sour. telegraph.co
There have been 77,000 jobs created in the past 12 months in the "real-estate sector", as it now prefers to call itself in an effort to live down a slightly seedy past, with 25,000 taken on in the last three months alone. The reasons are obvious. Property prices are finally once more on the up, after falling 16.6 per cent nationwide during the prolonged recession that hit estate agents as hard as any trader on the high street.
The combination of a return to economic growth, continuing very low interest rates, and a taxpayer-subsidised Help-to-Buy scheme are all fuelling the fire. For all its talk of the need to "re-balance" the economy by boosting manufacturing, the Government seems intent on making us a nation of estate agents rather than shopkeepers and factory owners.
This week, the London-based Foxtons chain, well-known for its brash sales folk ("Foxtons is based on a work-hard, play-hard ethic," its website boasts), offices that look more like cinema foyers and its fleet of highly decorated Mini Coopers, announced that its forthcoming £600 million stock market flotation is over-subscribed, with investors showing no sign of being worried about the property market overheating. Back in March, Countrywide, Britain's biggest estate agency (with 46 high-street brands, including Bairstow Eves and Hamptons), floated at the top end of City expectations.
Again, this has a familiar ring, only back in the 1990s it was banks and building societies, such as Lloyds, Nationwide and the Halifax, that were paying over the odds to gobble up small, independent estate agency chains, only to rush to dispose of them at a loss a decade later when the market turned sour. telegraph.co
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