The rules are changing in the house buying game……….

We were amused by this recent article in the Telegraph, highlighting how much things have changed for house finder.  With as many as nine out of every ten searches beginning on the internet these days, it raised the question whether the human being is now a redundant figure in a property transaction?

The article was in part inspired by the impending launch of the new Agents’ Mutual web site – ‘On the market.com’, destined to compete head on with Prime location, Rightmove and Zoopla in the new year. Some of their competitors’ statistics were interesting  –  Rightmove being quoted as having produced eight billion pages of properties in the first six months of the year, with 22 million enquiries having been forwarded to estate agents (and over 40% of searches coming from mobile phones).

The article logically asked ‘is property-buying is destined to become the province of robots, rather than real people?’.  No surprise, then, that the experts responded that you need contact with more than a mouse; that ‘Finding a property on the internet is just the start;  what you need is a person, someone who can sort through all that data’.

We couldn’t agree more.