London CallingLondon estate agents are using extreme tactics to get people to sell their homes in the current property drought. Angela Pertusinireports
CLUNK! Is that the post landing on the doormat? Let's see how many begging letters I have received today. These are not the usual kind, pleading with me to spare a few quid for a deserving cause, these, in fact, are the polar opposite: missives from under-employed estate agents urging me to sell my home and get rich, rich, rich.
Of course, estate agents touting for business is nothing new but their level of persistence and desperate tactics are something of a revelation.
Last week I received three mailed letters, each personally addressed to me, with ploys ranging from base greed (photographs of local houses with the percentage they had sold over the asking price stamped in red over them) to the weirdly intriguing ("Please ring us urgently now" - and nothing else save a squiggled signature).
And this does not include the dozen or more estate agency flyers that get stuffed through the letterbox for me to wipe my feet on each week.
All of which only goes to show yet again what a horrendous property drought we are currently experiencing.
Although there are signs that a few more homes are coming onto the market, most of us are far too indolent and cowardly to face selling up and waiting for the market to fall before we buy again.
Yet that is what we really should be doing. When even financial cognoscenti such as Matt Barrett, until recently chairman of Barclays, sells up and moves into a rented house, you have to ask yourself whether house prices will continue to soar or whether he knows something we don't.
Certainly the British - and largely Londoncentric - press is captivated by the situation, breathlessly reporting that there are now more than 1,000 homes on sale in London for more than £2 million (€2.9m) apiece and £1 million (€1.46m) mortgages are becoming unremarkable while gleefully predicting that we're all doomed.
As property inflation slows down to a relative standstill in many areas outside the capital and rises in interest rates are seen as inevitable, it does look as if the doom-mongers may finally be right.
There were those that gasped when the Barclay brothers paid £560 million for the Telegraph group of newspapers three years ago but finally the reclusive duo seem set to make a real profit from the ungrateful business.
Having moved operations last autumn from the Telegraph's offices in Canary Wharf to a building they owned in Victoria, the same building, Victoria Plaza, is now up for sale (with guaranteed tenant) for north of £200 million (€293m).
Like all sellers at the moment, the Barclays obviously expect the guide price to be a mere starting point rather than an indication of their expectations. The building was bought, incidentally, for £125 million (€183m) less than 18 months ago.
With Richard Desmond, owner of the Express group, also currently discussing moving some of his newspaper's editorial departments to the Docklands in order to free up and let out space in his City Thames-side offices, you have to wonder if publishing is really worth the bother or whether it is just an elaborate way of bigging up the property market that is the main focus of press barons' interests.
While the rest of the home-owning public has done pretty well out of the Blair years, the prime minister himself has suffered. First he sold his home in the choicest part of Islington at the beginning of the boom; later, his wife's choice of investment flats in Bristol proved extraordinarily ill-advised when it was found out she had used a convicted fraudster to help broker the deal and then, to add insult, had ended up paying more for them than other buyers.
Finally, in 2003 the Blairs bought a large, Georgian house in the West End which has brought them nothing but trouble.
At £3.6 million, once again they were seen to have paid too much, their would-be neighbours sniffed that the area was being dragged downmarket and they were unable to find tenants at the £3,900 a week asking rent, ending up settling for something around £2,500.
Now, with the Blairs on the brink of moving into the house themselves, they have hit another problem: planning permission.
They may have thought living next door to Gordon Brown was bad enough but the Blairs' new neighbours are objecting to plans to upgrade security and create a roof terrace (despite the price paid, there was no garden with the house).
The local (Tory) council will make its decision today.
Mr Blair will have many memories of his time at Downing Street but among the sweetest will surely be the fact that he was cossetted from the strains of home-ownership for so long.
