Where do I think the property market is going to be in the next five, 10, 15 years?

There is so many people talking now about everything becoming automated. If you look at the whole process from start to finish, you can split sales and lettings into two different areas. However, for now we'll look at sales for this question.

First thing you do in sales; is get a valuation done, then you're taking photos, then you're doing viewings. Then once the offer has been accepted, it goes to solicitors and then it gets conveyed, exchange, completion. This currently takes around 4 months!

Can we condense that down into a smaller period?

With automation, you probably can. One of the first things that's coming out in the next year or so, well it's technically actually already here but the banks aren't using it as much as they should be. It's AVM, automated valuation. Once that's in place, estate agents will be able to value a property online and have one of the most accurate valuations they can ever, ever get. Then when they display the valuation to the customer, they can either add on 5% or 10% to try and see if they win the instruction. The issue with this is that the banks will also use this AVM, so if you're overvaluing properties and get offers accepted over the valuation and then the bank turn around and say, "No, it's too high," who's going to bridge the gap? You wasted a bit of time, caused a lot of issues. Regardless I think the future could be AVM, automated valuation.

Another thing that will help is on the conveyancing side. At the moment, conveyancing can take between eight to 16 weeks. Yes, 16 weeks. That's nearly four months. It's a long, long time. But it's taking that long because a lot solicitors are still stuck in the Dark Ages. They're still doing anything via post. Some even mentioned the word fax. Can you believe it? The word fax has not been used in the last 10 years in my office! Solicitors need to change the way they work. AVM will help that, because solicitors won't be waiting for the valuation to come back from the surveyor, waiting for the negotiations to go through with the buyer and the vendor. It's all done automatically. It's all done quicker.

Another thing at the moment which is slowing down the whole process is the searches. Searches currently take between five to six weeks to come back. A lot of solicitors are ordering them on week five or six of the process of buying a property. We are ordering the searches at the start of the process, so we are cancelling out that long wait because we'll have them ordered straight away. So when it comes around to a point where we need them to start applying for inquiries, we've got what we need. It's in place and it's ready. It's all about condensing down the process and getting the process down from 16 weeks, get it down to eight weeks, as short as possible. It would be an absolute game changer for the whole market. Houses will be selling faster. There will be a lot more people buying because they won't be wasting time.

How could VR change the property market?

How can it make us as a better industry?

Is VR going to be the replacement for estate agents? Are going to become just professional regulated door openers and door closers?

It could happen. Tenants will start viewing properties and buyers start viewing properties with VR goggles from the comfort and safety of their own home. They look at them through these goggles and they see if they can see themselves in this house. They could do 10 or 15 VR viewings in an hour and they can work out which ones they want to see. Once they've done this, it comes at the agent and we can go and show them the one they already pre-checked and they love and then they take it.

It'll probably save us time. We're not going to be waiting for tenants outside the house. The amount of times me (Sami) and the negotiators have waited for tenants and buyers outside houses and we're also guilty. We've been late ourselves. It's not always because we're lazy. Sometimes it's traffic and we understand there's so many more external variables that can affect the timing of a viewing. If we can just lower the amount of viewings we're doing; we're going to save money on fuel, on cars, on hours, on people, on manpower, because we're going to be able to do all the viewings through VR and then do the final, we could call it the pre-acceptance viewing, the reality viewing. They take the property, agree on offer. That could save us time. That could be here in the next two, three years. That could be an industry standard in two, three years. Considering many agents, including ourselves can do it. We're just not doing it right now. It would literally take about two or three weeks to implement the whole thing. It's not that complicated.

In essence, the future of Estate Agency is to remove the amount of human interaction and replace it with some sort of computer interaction because that's what the customers of tomorrow want. If you look at every child on their phone now, what they're doing, they're on TikTok. They're on social media. And it's all they're doing. It's not a bad thing. They're our future customers. They're the ones we've got to be tapping into. So yes, I think the future will be VR. I think everything will be automated. There will always be a human interaction. There will always be an office. There will always be people working together. But a lot of the menial tasks will just be automated.

On a side note:

Imagine, we get phone calls every day asking and chasing where contractors are for a job, a property, which we're meant to fix. We then called the contractor, find out where they are. Then we then call the tenant, call them back, and then liaise. It's a process which could be streamlined. It could be automated. There should be some sort of app out there. So if you are an builder, you want to design something like that, get in touch with me. We can probably help.