News.Scotland.Org

Do Estate Agents Have It To Easy?Do estate agents and solicitors have an easy life? I recently added a property section to our Scotland site. I wanted to see what response we would get and how effective our site would be for very competitive search terms like Properties for sale in Scotland.

After about 1 week the site started to perform incredibly well, and our site has achieved a high ranking on many property key words for Scotland. The property section of our site being Properties for sale in Scotland

We have also added the major cities, Edinburgh properties and Glasgow properties for sale. Now that we had achieved positioning on the search engines and traffic was hitting our property section, this I thought,  would be the easy bit, adding properties…. How wrong was I!  I’ve been involved with the Internet for almost 10 years and I have never witnessed such a poor response from any industry.

I proceeded to build a very exhaustive list of solicitors and estate agents in Scotland and contacted them all by email. Of course I would expect a poor response 1st time round to an email campaign, but at least I was expecting a response. Not one person has responded to my email and when I called I was told by several estate agent they would think about it. The email offered was allowing agents to add their customers properties for FREE for 2007 to our property section.

So where did I go wrong? I know the site gets good traffic, I know we appear on the major search engines and I am pretty sure that the site is easy to navigate. So is it possible that all solicitors and estate agents in Scotland have enough business without having to be aggressive? Is it they don’t understand why it’s important to have as many good internet channels as possible to market properties? Or is it because they don’t really have much in the way of competition?
So maybe it is about time the Sellers actually missed out the middle man and go direct!!! Why pay between 1 to 3% commission to agents who cannot be bother to understand and get good at the internet. How many solicitors websites have you come across which are appalling, bad photos, bad navigation and not up to date. I say “power to the people!!!” start marketing your homes direct. The travel industry learnt this years ago, people want to book direct with hotels, they don’t want to go through agent, so why is selling your house any different? Of course there is the legal aspect, but a solicitor can still do that part of the process, just don’t allow them to sell your house and make money without really having to work for it.

The advantages of going direct and selling through the internet:

• You can save your self a small fortune. With the average house price above £180,000 in the UK now and the average solicitor fee being 2%, they are making £3600 per sale.
• You can deal with buyers direct, my own personnel property experience has proved the more involved I am in buying or selling a property the better outcome has been. When you deal direct with buyers you can get a real feel for people’s opinion about your property. It also give buyers an opportunity to find out how much you really want…
• You are in total control of the sale of your property.
• You can be very flexible about arranging viewings.

The disadvantages of selling direct:

• Confidence, if you are not in a rush to sell then you can take your time and get the right deal, however if you need to sell straight away you may sell to cheaply.
• All marketing costs are yours and these normally have to be paid up front (although these costs can still be much cheaper than a solicitor doing it).
• You will still need a solicitor to deal with the legal issues, deeds etc.

There are several websites which can help advise you on how to sell your property, so if you are up for the challenge and want to save some money why not give it a go and sell your own property.

October, 8

Good news for Scottish whisky lovers, in an initiative to protect the Scottish whisky industry, government has decided to regulate the imitation of Scotch whisky. It is know that many of such whisky’s like Highland, Lowland, Speyside, Campbeltown and Islay will be made illegal. This decision was taken by the Westminister Government yesterday.

Government took this step to conserve the heritage of Scottish whisky; this new law will take over from the Scotch Whisky Act 1988 and the Scotch Whisky Order 1990. It will also permit few labels of Scotch whisky to be added to an EU list of Geographical Indications. The Scottish whisky industry is worth £2 billion a year, which gives the economy a great push and also provides employment opportunities to many.

The new move by the government will also help to check the rapid incidences of foreign distilleries trying to misrepresent Scottish whisky and harming its authenticity in the global market. Many such brands are forged into markets creating a wrong impression of the age old Scottish whisky industry. There has been a long waiting by the Scottish Whisky Association for a revised regulation to safeguard the Scotch whisky.

The association needed to protect the place of Scottish whisky in the export market, said Hilary Benn, the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Secretary. He further added “The proposed legislation will make special provisions relating to Scotch whisky. The proposals will define tightly the descriptions applied to Scotch whisky – for example ’single malt’ or ‘blended grain’. They will also tightly define its geographical provenance – such as Highland or Islay – and ensure that if the product uses the name of a distillery then it must also come from that distillery.”

Another benefit of this regulation is that it has widely classified the Scotch whisky into five categories, single malt, single grain, blended, blended malt and blended grain. It also has categorized five geographical areas including Highland, Lowland, Speyside, Campbeltown, and Islay. The regulation mentioned that the whisky will only have the label of these areas if it has been completely made here. Another important point mentioned in the regulation was the whisky exported should be bottled and labeled properly.

Experts says that this move from government will benefit the Scottish whisky industry, to raise the exports which are worth over £2 billion and holds a major part in the economy of the country. This move will help the industry to make its ground firm in the market.