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With the housing market slowing down, times are hard for estate agents. But given their reputation – however unfair – will people care?
“Sympathy” and “estate agent” are not words often found in the same sentence.
Characterised as pushy and insincere, the good ones, just like journalists and politicians, are viewed as the exception rather than the rule.
But given the doom and gloom headlines about the housing market, how badly are they suffering?
As they depend so directly on sales, the fall in mortgages does not make happy reading. Between November and February, the monthly figure for mortgages on new homes fell from 80,000 to below 50,000, according to the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML).
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It’s tough out there, says Peter Bolton King, chief executive of the National Association of Estate Agents, but save your sympathy because it’s only the bad ones who are going to the wall.
“Estate agents offering a good service, qualified people who know what they’re doing and employ quality people, they always rise above others in this kind of market. The cream rises to the top.
“So far the people closing offices and laying off staff, the feeling I’m getting is it’s not our members – it’s not the older established agents – it’s those who set up in the boom period and thought ‘Anyone can sell property’.
“I don’t have massive sympathy for those who aren’t doing a proper job.”
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Overall it’s a mixed picture with agents in some areas prospering and some not. Lettings are doing well but the corporate sector has wielded the axe, with big names like Countrywide among those closing offices in this sector.
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 They may be taking home less money than they need to pay the mortgage, with the obvious irony that entails  Henry Pryor, ex-estate agent
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“A lot of estate agents haven’t seen this sort of slower market before, and it will come as a shock to them. But it shouldn’t because it means it’s a proper negotiating, selling market when you have to know what you’re talking about.”
He is confident the market could pick up again soon because – unlike in the crash of the early 90s, when interest rates and unemployment were high – there are plenty of people eager to move.
A bleaker picture is painted by Henry Pryor, a former estate agent and housing expert, who says that with sales falling so dramatically, it’s a desperate situation for people dependent on commission.
“A lot of estate agents are paid a basic salary and a performance bonus.
“Through no fault of their own, they will not be doing the business they would expect to be and this will have very serious repercussions on relationships and marriages because they may be taking home less money than they need to pay the mortgage, with the obvious irony that entails.”
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Emma Linnane in her apartment in Dublin. Its value has declined by $100,000.
The collapse of the housing bubble in the United States is mutating into a global phenomenon, with real estate prices swooning from the Irish countryside and the Spanish coast to Baltic seaports and even parts of northern India.
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This synchronized global slowdown, which has become increasingly stark in recent months, is hobbling economic growth worldwide, affecting not just homes but jobs as well.
In Ireland, Spain, Britain and elsewhere, housing markets that soared over the last decade are falling back to earth. Property analysts predict that some countries, like this one, will face an even more wrenching adjustment than that of the United States, including the possibility that the downturn could become a wholesale collapse.
To some extent, the world’s problems are a result of American contagion. As home financing and credit tightens in response to the crisis that began in the subprime mortgage market, analysts worry that other countries could suffer the mortgage defaults and foreclosures that have afflicted California, Florida and other states.
Citing the reverberations of the American housing bust and credit squeeze, the International Monetary Fund last Wednesday cut its forecast for global economic growth this year and warned that the malaise could extend into 2009.
“The problems in the U.S. are being transmitted to Europe,” said Michael Ball, professor of urban and property economics at the University of Reading in Britain, who studies housing prices. “What’s happening now is an awful lot more grief than we expected.”
For countries like Ireland, where prices were even more inflated than in the United States, it has been a painful education, as homeowners learn the American vocabulary of misery.
“We know we’re already in negative equity,” said Emma Linnane, a 31-year-old university administrator.
She bought a cozy, one-bedroom apartment in the Dublin suburbs with her fiancé, Paul Colgan, in May 2006, at the peak of the market. They paid $575,000 — at least $100,000 more than it would fetch today. “I sometimes get shivers thinking about it,” Ms. Linnane said, “but I’ll let the reality hit me when I go to sell it.”
That reality is spreading. Once-sizzling housing markets in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states are cooling rapidly, as nervous Western Europeans stop buying investment properties in Warsaw, Tallinn, Estonia and other real estate Klondikes.
Further east, in India and southern China, prices are no longer surging. With stock markets down sharply after reaching heady levels, people do not have as much cash to buy property. Sales of apartments in Hong Kong, a normally hyperactive market, have slowed recently, with prices for mass-market flats starting to drop.
In New Delhi and other parts of northern India, prices have fallen 20 percent over the last year. Sanjay Dutt, an executive director in the Mumbai office of Cushman & Wakefield, the real estate firm, describes it as an erosion of confidence.
Much of the retrenchment seems to be following the basic law of gravity: what goes up must come down. With low interest rates helping to inflate housing bubbles in many countries, economists said the confluence of falling prices was predictable, if unsettling.
This is not the first housing downturn to cross borders, but its reverberations have been amplified by the integration of financial markets. When faulty American mortgages end up on the books of European banks, the problems of the United States aggravate the world’s problems.
Consider Britain, which had one of Europe’s most robust housing markets, with less of an oversupply than in Ireland or Spain. Then last summer came the subprime crisis across the Atlantic.
Within two months, mortgage approvals dropped 31 percent, compared with the previous year. And by March, average housing prices had fallen 2.5 percent, the largest monthly decline since 1992.
“The boom in house prices was actually much bigger here than in the U.S.,” said Kelvin Davidson, an economist at Capital Economics in London. “If anything, people should be more worried than in the U.S.”
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