50 not out - a life in property

With a 50 year career in property (he claims to have started when he was 3!) there is little Mike Day hasn't seen or heard. 

In this latest episode of the Today's Conveyancer Podcast, Day sits down with David Opie to discuss a career which has taken him to the very top of estate agency and conveyancing operations as board member at Connells and becoming heavily involved in building one of the UK’s earliest large‑scale, panel‑based conveyancing businesses.

Day even remembers the days before the internet and mobile phones; but he says, the fundamentals of the home‑buying process remain much the same. 

Despite the technological evolution of both the estate agency and conveyancing sector, the persistent lack of integration continues to hamper progress; borne out in extended transaction timescales. 

All the talk of instructing solicitors at the point of listing is not new... Day gives a compelling example from Connells where they cut transaction times from 13 to 10 weeks by instructing their panel firms at listing; allowing the business to turn its pipeline faster and adding £8 million to the bottom line. The fact the industry is still debating early instruction 25 years later, he says, highlights how fragmented the sector remains. He fears unless the government mandates structural changes, such as upfront information or compulsory early instruction, progress will remain painfully slow.

On referral fees you'd expect the estate agent in him to provide a robust defence, but with caveats. He argues referral fees can be justified when the agent genuinely adds value through marketing and onboarding work. The problem, he says, is that many agents simply pass over a phone number and expect to earn a fee. At the same time, excessive referral fees have squeezed conveyancers’ margins so tightly that service quality, investment in people, and technology have inevitably suffered. Transparency, he says, is essential, and the industry has not always delivered it.

Training, standards, fees, technology, management and Rightmove are all on the agenda in this fascinating discussion with one of the property industry's most experienced, and colourful characters. 

The Today's Conveyancer podcast can be found on your preferred podcast provider and also at www.todaysconveyancer.co.uk. Subscribe and listen in for all the latest conveyancing industry news and views. 

Thank you to our podcast sponsors LEAP Legal Software, Moneypenny and Compass.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:23

You're listening to the Today's Conveyancer podcast, the leading source of information for residential property lawyers in England and Wales. Don't forget to subscribe and sign up to our free newsletter at today'sconveyancer.co.uk. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

SPEAKER_02 0:45

Hello, welcome along to the latest Today's Conveyancer podcast. Today we have well 50 years of industry experience on the podcast. Michael Day, owner of Integra Property Services, he will tell you he started when he was three, but uh he looks very well for it. Mike, great to have you on the podcast. Thanks so much for joining.

SPEAKER_01 1:07

David, lovely to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Um, yes, I do tell people that I started when I was three. It isn't quite true. Um, I was 16, but it's still an awful long, uh, an awful long time ago, and we've seen an awful lot of things happen in that time.

SPEAKER_02 1:21

A lot of water under the bridge. And and I guess really today, I want to lean into that. I kind of want to understand a bit more about your uh your background, um, mostly an estate agency, although you do cross over into conveyancing uh at one point in your career. And uh just really kind of talking about some of your experiences over that period, uh, and I know you've got some frustrations, like so many of us, about uh some of the ills of the market as well. So uh thoroughly looking forward to this conversation. First things first, I don't think you'll be overly familiar to the conveyancing community. I know you're very well known an estate agency, but who are you? What do you what do you do now? And then sort of tell us a bit about how you got there.

SPEAKER_01 2:10

Yeah, problem. Um, yep, 50 years. Uh so I started very much as a junior trainee. Um, my in fact, my first job on December the 29th, 1975. My first role was to climb into the window of an estate agency office and clear the artificial snow off the window in my brand new 3P6 of an inauspicious start. Um, went on, did my qualifications, I became a uh a member of the ISVA, as was the Incorporated Society of Values and Auctioneers, now part of RICS. Um, moved on through my career. I suppose a defining change was when I joined a company called AC Frost and Company in the early 80s, opened an office in Uxbridge incredibly successfully, um, became a partner there, and my career took off. We sold that business to the Prudential um in 86, and I ended up as the regional MD of the Prudential. Um, the PRU bailed out in 1991, and I joined Connells, and I had 12 years at Connells, and this is where my first, not my first involvement with conveyancing, but my first sort of direct managing involvement with conveyancing came in. But I was on the board at Connells, um, I was there for 12 years, and for the and then I left Connells in 2003, and I've been running my own show ever since. And uh I currently have a roster of about 1,500 um clients across the property industry, um, mainly estate agents, but some conveyancers, developers, various related um people. And I guess I'm best known now for probably training and development um type work, but I do a lot of sort of consulting and sort of quasi non-exec director type roles, and I've had a couple of roles within let's call them prop tech uh businesses uh during that period of time. So quite a wide-reaching brief. Obviously, conveyancing has been there the whole time because, of course, as an estate agent dealing with conveyancing all the way through. So the good, the bad, and the ugly has been there for 50 years.

SPEAKER_02 4:13

And uh this is a really tricky one, I think, to start with, Mike, but can you kind of sum up your experience of the market over that that 50 years in just uh just a few words? Maybe choose choose these carefully.

SPEAKER_01 4:30

Well, I think um I I think the disappointing, most disappointing thing is that we haven't made as much progress on certain aspects, like um link it pulling things together as much as we should have done, and uh, and of course speeding things up, because it's uh in reality it's got an awful lot slower. So that's the disappointment. On the plus side of things, over 50 years I've met a hell of a lot of people, have made a lot of very good friends and and contacts, including yourself, over that uh period of time. Um, and in the main, it's been great fun. Of course, one's had to deal with the public, so there is always uh you know that side to it as well, but nevertheless, um, you know, it's a people business, and that's really what keeps me going.

SPEAKER_02 5:11

And I mean, that is something that is largely unchanged over that period of time. This is still very, very people driven. And I mean, to a certain extent, that's possibly, and this is conjecture, I suppose, but that's possibly why technology hasn't had the impact that it might or could have done, because it always comes back to people, Mike.

SPEAKER_01 5:32

Yes, it does. Um, technology has made differences, of course it has uh along the way. I mean, you know, over my career, we've seen the emergence of the internet. Imagine that, you know, and uh, you know, so you know, that which was you know, it's only 30 years ago, um, you know, that we sort of first started seeing the internet. At Connell's, I was uh on the board of directors when we set up Right Move in 2000. So, you know, it's not lifetimes ago this stuff, you know, it's relatively quick. But I do think we're about to see and are beginning to see already the biggest changes, and that will come through the use of AI. Um, so the technology that has been, if you like, software-based and whatever, has all been different. It's all been a question of can you integrate it and bolt it together and whatever else. That is going to rapidly change now with the development of AI and the ability for AI to humanize large parts of the heavy lifting of the processes. It won't do away with people, but it may well do away with some of the things that they do in you know, in terms of reading, reading documentation, uh, onboarding of clients, a lot of the sort of what I would describe as more sort of um routine things. Um certainly AI will be able to rattle through that very quickly. The bit that it won't be able to do, not immediately at least, is put its arm around somebody when they're pouring their eyes out because they're getting divorced or somebody's died or they're getting married, you know, all the reasons why people transact. That's still a human element. But hopefully what it will do is it will free people up to do that better as well, so that um, you know, we end up with a a faster, smoother result where people get paid better, but we deliver greater service and greater results.

SPEAKER_02 7:23

I I've said on this podcast, and I've said it to a number of people as well, I've I've got past this concept of AI taking my job. I'm I'm not concerned about that. What I am concerned about though, and what I think people should be uh very cognizant of, is that the people that use AI better than me will take my job.

SPEAKER_01 7:47

Yep, there is no doubt that, you know, I mean, as with everything, you'll get um early adopters, fast followers, and then laggards basically, and then people who go, What the hell was that? Um, you know, and and and that will happen. And there will undoubtedly be a shake out. I mean, across the 50 years I've been in the industry, you know, there's been various changes of different types coming along, competition, um, you know, um, your audience, which is you know clearly going to predominantly be in the conveyancing market, you know, will be looking at me and thinking, oh yeah, he set up Connell's conveyancing operation, you know, referral fees and all this stuff, and we'll touch on that in a in a minute, and I'll I'll I'll justify my position in just a moment. Um, but the the simple fact is we have to live through those changes. The industry hasn't always adjusted very well to that and made the best of it, and I've got a few views about that. But generally, you know, change is inevitable.

SPEAKER_02 8:49

Well, go on then, Mike. Let's uh let's think about the opposite of that change then. What hasn't changed in in the industry that perhaps surprises you or or doesn't surprise you?

SPEAKER_01 9:03

Well, I think the if you think of the conveyancing process, the catalyst, the first port of call, remains largely the estate agent. Because people go to the estate agent either because they're looking for a property or because they've got to sell a property or dispose of a property. So the agent remains the sort of catalyst for the thing, which is why you know at Connell's we went into conveyancing because we had the opportunity of grabbing the customer, and indeed now you you get, you know, you're getting complaints about conditional selling from mortgage brokers and things because the agent captures a customer and gets to them before the individual mortgage broker. That's competition. That's you know, providing it's done fairly and legitimately, or whatever, that is competition, and actually that hasn't really changed. What has changed is that the agents, and we spotted it in the 80s as we became these big monolithic organizations like the prudential or whatever, that we had this opportunity to grab some of that and distribute it, and that is that has continued. I think it's gone too far in certain respects and whatever else. And I think the legal profession in particular has ended up at the bottom of the food chain. I think there's an opportunity for it to fight back, but it's going to have to invest um in order to do that. But the, you know, that that is the fundamental thing that hasn't changed. At the end of the day, the process of buying and selling a house is pretty much the same as it was a hundred years ago. You know, there's a few bolt-ons and things with legislation and anti-money laundering and all the other sort of stuff that comes with it, but the the basic process is exactly the same.

SPEAKER_02 11:07

I I sense, and and you know, you talk about the fact that change is coming and there are opportunities for conveyances, and I'm I 100% agree. If we can get to a point where we are instructing at the point of listing, which it feels like there's some real impetus behind, that potentially could change that dynamic, couldn't it?

SPEAKER_01 11:28

I don't think it'll change the dynamic, it will certainly change the process. 25 years ago, when we set up Connell's conveyancing operation, that is exactly what we did. We used to, when we took a property into the market, we instructed a lawyer to act for the seller. So that was exactly what happened. Now we did it because we were capturing the customer and bluntly we were in a fee out of that arrangement and whatever. We were effectively doing the marketing for the lawyer. We were, you know, instead of them advertising in the yellow pages or something as it was then, they, you know, we were doing that for them and setting the thing up. We were doing the onboarding uh for them. The byproduct that we hadn't immediately realized, I've got to be perfectly honest, was that a transaction took 13 weeks at that time. Gosh, wouldn't that be lovely? 13 weeks at that time. We noticed very rapidly that our transactions took 10. Now, if you're a business like an estate agency, you have a pipeline of business, as does a conveyancer, and we were turning our pipeline every 13 weeks, so four times a year. By reducing that to 10, it turned our pipeline five times a year. That put eight million pounds on our bottom line the following year. That was the difference it made. And here we are, 25 years or so later, still talking about wouldn't that be a good idea? And it's fragmented, and we've had the consultation now from the government, we obviously await the outcome on the home buying process and material information and all this sort of stuff. Um, great, but you know, let's see what comes out of it. Um, unless it's mandated, it'll remain fragmented.

SPEAKER_02 13:09

I mean, you you talk about the success that you had uh by bolting the conveyancing on to a state agency, and of course, you know, it's a reasonably well-trodden path, but it hasn't developed in the way that it could or perhaps should have done. I mean, eight million pounds is you know not to be sniffed at.

SPEAKER_01 13:25

No, and they've still got that, of course, because you know what what Connells did, and I mean, just to give you a little bit of a history lesson on this, Countrywide was the first firm into conveyancing on scale, but they bought uh conveyancing operations and so they owned the means of production, if you like. We took a look at this because we were a major competitor of countrywide at the time. We took a look at it and said, Well, we like this idea of you know bolting the conveyance, but we don't want to own it. We you know, so we panelled it, we created panels and we had some major firms as part of our panel and we controlled it and whatever else, but we didn't own it. That way, when the market, as it does from time to time, drops or whatever and the volumes go, we weren't left with you know um office blocks full of people twiddling their thumbs. That was the lawyer's problem, not our problem. So it worked much better for us. We did subsequently acquire a conveyancing conveyancing car direct, um, still owned by Connells down in on the south coast, um, and that enabled us to have some in-house production, but it certainly wasn't the bulk of what we were doing. And we were able to cherry-pick the work that we sent to that operation, so the more profitable work and whatever we could send to that operation, and the the rest of the stuff was panelled out across the network. So we were quite, I like to think we were quite smart about how we we played it. Connells, of course, have subsequently invested. I mean, that Connells now own countrywide, um, but Connells have subsequently invested, and you'll have seen, and I'm sure you published it, um, the story recently about the transaction that went through in you know, you know, in a matter of a few days. That was through part of their tie-ups with uh various providers in in the industry. So they're working hard at that again. In the meantime, we had the arrival of home information packs, they came and went. They weren't the perfect answer. A lot of people didn't like them. We should have persevered with them, we should have evolved them and whatever, because actually, what we need now is legal ready property and home information packs, auction type stuff. It would have evolved, but it got killed. That was a mistake.

SPEAKER_02 15:41

And a completely different podcast, Mike. I mean, hips, we can we can probably talk about that for the rest of the afternoon. Let me go back to uh let me go back to referral fees. Uh, and we're with a whistle stop tour through your uh your life and also through the property market as well. But I mean, you know, you you you said that you had a defense of referral fees. Um they are they're a really mixed bag amongst conveyances, because of course there will be conveyances that pay them, there will be conveyances that will very happily pay them as well, there will be conveyances that pay them and are a little bit disgruntled about doing so, and of course there will be people that simply won't uh won't countenance. I mean, you clearly have a view on referral fees. Please do share, but also share kind of a bit about um sort of some of the defense you you talked about there as well.

unknown 16:32

Right.

SPEAKER_01 16:33

Referral fees. In principle, I don't have an issue with referral fees, okay.

SPEAKER_02 16:39

It is, of course, the estate agent.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

Says the estate agent, but also says the man who was a director of a conveyancing company. Um, so I'd like to think I have a reasonably balanced uh view view of this. Some of your listeners and that will probably disagree, but there we go. But the problem or the or the upside of the referral fee, we were doing something for that referral fee. We weren't just passing a telephone number over to somebody and saying, oh, phone them and see if you can win the business, which is pretty passive and pathetic, quite frankly, and is why an awful lot of estate agents are not very successful at working with their conveyances because they're not actually doing much of a job. They're not selling a service. Going back to we'll use the Connells experience as the uh as the sort of benchmark here. What we did was we sold the conveyancing proposition. It we had a it had a series of uh it was a fixed fee, it was no move, no fee, it had you know some sort of service standard. We sold it, we onboarded the client, and so we were doing part of the job for the conveyance of the marketing part of the job and the onboarding part of the job we were doing. That is why we were worth a referral fee. We weren't just giving somebody a database of telephone numbers or something and saying, phone these people and see if you can win some business. And unfortunately, that has been what has largely happened in the industry. And they pass it over and they just give a telephone number, you know, the agent gives a telephone, and the solicitor either does a good job or doesn't do a good job of converting it, and really the relationship is not always where it could be. The other thing is greed has stepped in, and the size of some of the referral fees is out of all proportion to what is being provided, and in order to keep the headline rates down, the Slister invariably has ended up getting less and less out of a scenario, and consequently, the quality of service and everything that goes with it technology, investment, blah blah has not kept up. That is false economics from everybody's point of view. It's false economics from the agent because they're referring their business to a firm that can't deliver good quality work in return for a fee that they're not going to get because the sale isn't gonna go through. So who gains from that? Nobody. The conveyancer gets a whole load of work that is useless because it doesn't proceed and doesn't get any money for doing it. It's poor commercial practice. And you know, across the sector, you know, there are very few people in estate agency and in conveyancing that are great business people. There's a pretty bold statement. There's um, you know, a lot of people in a state agency started as a negotiator, were quite good at selling houses, ended up running an estate agency business. No business experience, no planning, no strategy. It's not too dissimilar in the conveyancing world. A lot of people came out, you know, qualified through being a licensed conveyancer or solicitor. Technically, probably quite good. How much business training does a solicitor get? How much business training does a conveyancer get or an estate? Very little, I would suggest. And I think it shows.

SPEAKER_02 20:04

I look at the issue of referral fees, and I'm very careful about how I frame uh some of this because I'm very conscious that listeners have got differing views on it. But there is a cost of client acquisition. And you know, you you referred to it earlier in the conversation about the fact that you know you are effectively doing the marketing for the conveyances. Um there is a very real cost of acquisition, and whether you're paying Google for Google ad searches, whether you're paying uh comparison websites, uh, or whether you're paying your your estate agent, there is still a fee for uh trying to uh win win business effectively. And and so um provided and and I and I think one of the big challenges around referral fees is the lack of transparency around them. That's where the murkiness sort of exists, if you like. And so provided that people understand uh that and understand the sort of the i it is a much more transparent process, then um you know I don't see that referral fees should be banned. I mean, you know, interestingly, there is a obviously a decent weight of um a decent weight of people who believe that they should be banned.

SPEAKER_01 21:16

Yeah, and uh and and and that's fine, um, but in which case um estate agents will just buy a few conveyances and um you know and and and handle it effectively on more of an in-house type uh approach. Now, not everybody will be able to do that. Um I think the it needs to, you know, the two if you I I don't like calling it two sites because it makes it sound adversarial, but uh, you know, if you take the conveyances and the estate agents, they should be working as one and the and the same in the client's best interest. Referral fees exist across everything insurance, you know, mortgages, you know, and whatever. Nothing, you know, no issue, transparency is of course key, and that clearly isn't always as where it where it should be, and I'm I'm I'm for full transparency on all of this stuff. Um at the end of the day, we need to be delivering for the for the customer. Fees are too low, um, and everybody's trying to take a slice of everybody else's cake here, but quite frankly, some of the service delivery from all parts of the process and transaction is poor. Um, you know, if I go back 20, 30, 40, 50 years dealing with the local solicitor above the fish and chip shop, I'd get a better service out of that guy or girl there dealing with you know small volumes, localized and whatever else, than you do now out of some really quite big, slick operations. Probably that person's fee was higher. Than the pro rata now, than the fee they're getting now. Estate agency fees have nearly halved in the last 25 years. I know they haven't halved in so much the property values have risen in, but in terms of percentage terms, estate agency fees now run at around 1%. Back in the 1980s, we never did business below 2%. So, you know, that tells you that you know we've all succeeded in a race to the bottom.

SPEAKER_02 23:18

And we'll come on to that in just a second, Mike, because I wonder if you may have been part of the architecture behind that, but bear with. Let's go back to the point you make about uh training and uh quality of people that lead in these businesses because uh yeah, tricky issue to tackle. But I I absolutely take your point. As the son of a GP and as a son of a teacher, uh, both of whom became uh senior in their roles by virtue of the fact that they were good at what they did rather than being good administrators. I wholeheartedly take your point that uh there's lots of law firms out there that um have uh people who are very good technically, but aren't particularly necessarily very good at the management and administrative side of it. And it's a big part of what you do as well, isn't it, now is sort of training and mentoring and working with uh with people. Um how do we improve that? How do we make sure that, for example, I mean, what one thing, for example, that I I always think about is the quality of understanding amongst estate agents of conveyancing and vice versa.

SPEAKER_01 24:48

I think taking the business side, of course, deregulation and that came along whenever it was 18 years ago or what so structures within conveyancing and whatever have changed a degree, and you it's perfectly possible to have non-conveyancer people now involved in the running of the business, and that is probably a good thing because just because somebody's a good conveyancer doesn't make them a good business person and vice versa, the same in estate agency. So, you know, you want the best person for whatever the role is in the organization, but there is still an awful lot of people that have come up through the ranks that has some benefits through knowledge and understanding of what's going on at the front desk, as it were. But I, for example, when I was 40, so 25 years ago, you know, I put myself through an MBA. So I was on the board of Connells, I did an MBA in my spare time. That transformed my business career, uh, transformed my thinking, it gave me a wider uh sort of view on how things work. And three years later, I set up my own business, so it probably acted as a catalyst for that. So I think people need to look at put surrounding themselves with the best people and making sure that they're giving those people the room and whatever to do whatever that that role is. I do a lot of work in training and development and whatever, both management, sales, and compliance, uh you know, mainly in the estate agency sector, but on the people side with management and and things, that could be in quite frankly, in any sector. Um and of course there are firms that are doing this. Of course there are out there, but there's an awful lot that aren't. Um, and I would say, I can tell you that within the estate agency world, I'm not sure what the figure might be within conveyancing, but I would say that 80% of estate agents do not have a business plan. So they would have started January the 1st this year thinking, I wonder what this year is going to be like, and I wonder how it's only 20% have had a have a plan, a budget, some objectives, you know, and a monitoring against it. It wouldn't surprise me that if you took conveyancing as a whole, the picture is not too different. Of course, the big boys are gonna have, you know, that's in place, but as you take it down the pyramid, as it were, um, it wouldn't surprise me that a lot of small firms are just turning up and hoping that this week is better than last week.

SPEAKER_02 27:15

We'd have a bit of a meander through property and your history. Uh, it would be remiss of us not to talk about right move and uh the impact that it has had on the industry as well. I mean, did you at the time anticipate that it might do what it has has done? And and a reminder for people, of course, Connells, amongst a couple of other uh estate agencies, were the the architects of it, effectively, weren't they?

SPEAKER_01 27:41

Yeah, it was back in 2000. And um Connells were one of the original investors. We we we bought an 11% state, cost us 1.1 million. It was a 10 million pound start-up, and it was the other big estate agency players, countrywide, Halifax, and the Royal that were involved. Um, so that wasn't a bad investment, 1.1 million on a business that's now worth over 4 billion. So it was you know pretty pretty decent. Um we the vision was a guy called Harry Hill, who was the chief executive of uh countrywide at the time, and and they owned the name Wright Move, and they were going to use it for their own website. The web was really only just beginning to shape up. In fact, when Wright Move launched, I mean, three-quarters of estate agents didn't have their own websites, so you know that was the way it is, and we saw it as a way of sort of replacing the local papers, aggregating property. It has, of course, become this um beast, this uh huge uh monolithic beast. There's some competition there in terms of Zupla and uh on the market, but right move still currently dominates, although it's it's gonna have to buck its ideas up because its technology is, you know, we we won't know what's going on behind the scenes, but clearly with AI coming down the pipe, AI searching and this sort of stuff, there may well be some huge changes. What we probably didn't realize was that it would become the first port of call for everything. And so um people don't go to a state, even as I said earlier that you know estate agents were the catalyst for the process. Well, they are in so much as they have the house, but actually, really, it's right move. Um, because people search. There are people, as we talk here, on right move, you know, the property pawn viewers, the you know, they're they're they're searching right move, just dreaming and whatever else. Um, and they go and they find the property through that, and then from there it may go to an estate agent. So it is going to the estate agent later than it used to. If you went back pre-Right Move, somebody would have had to have gone into town, wandered around the estate agency offices, or picked up the local paper and phoned them or whatever to find out what was going on in that town. They can do it all now, all that pre-work can be done online through the major portals. Did we envisage that? Probably not to the degree that it is. Could Right Move faced with um, I mean, because what it has is incredible brand awareness and uh and traffic, um, there's always been this concern that could it turn itself into poacher gamekeeper and effectively become an online um sales entity in its own right? I don't personally think so. But is it possible? Yes, of course it is, yeah. And I guess it depends on web whether it gets pushed up against the wall too much.

SPEAKER_02 30:38

Yeah, and and you know, coming back to fees, it has it has had an impact on fees as well, hasn't it? Because of course it it's been part of that sort of driver uh for for reducing fees.

SPEAKER_01 30:50

Well, and so if I let me just cut across you there, sorry David, very briefly. Um when I did my um I referred to my MBA a moment ago and and I did a research project which was on the internet and its effect on residential agents. It was a huge project because I had access to a huge audience through Conrad. So I was able to do this massive bit of research that got a very good grade for it as well, but nevertheless, um it effectively predicted the arrival of the execution-only service essay agency, the sort of purple bricks type of model, the online model. Um, and when I set up Integra, I had an agency business with it in 2003, and we were what would now be regarded as a hybrid operation. We had an office, but it wasn't a high street premise. We were covering quite a wide area, et cetera, et cetera. And these models are now beginning to evolve. Um, the pure online model is perhaps not as successful as it could be, but we've now got the emergence of these so-called self-employed individuals operating under a let's call it an umbrella organization. Um, and that is reducing the amount of impact that a high street office perhaps has, where the footfall and things in high streets is obviously way, way lower. So we are seeing change, but it is slow and gradual. And what we've now got is more estate agents than we've ever had, but each one is doing far less business. Back in the day, if you had a high street office, you needed to do a couple of hundred sales a year. Now you might have somebody operating from a back bedroom. If they do 20, they're probably quite happy. So they're never going to be the sort of brand or the name or whatever, but they can run a successful personalized business. So I think you know, we're again going through a period of change.

SPEAKER_02 32:37

There's a parallel. There's a parallel in conveyancing in the same way with these roles, yeah, Taylor Rose and uh and people like that.

SPEAKER_01 32:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:46

Um let's uh let's flip back to AI very, very briefly, because AI could, uh, if recent conferences I've attended are to be believed, actually start to democratize the property market again by bypassing some of these large portals, the likes of WriteMove. Because you instead of going to the Right Move website or Zupla or on the market, you instead go to your AI search engine, you type in, I want to find a property, three-bedroomed with C Views in uh Portsmouth or wherever it might be, and it will go and do a lot of that legwork for you and use estate agent websites as well as uh portal websites to try and identify uh these properties. You're nodding along, it's a possibility.

SPEAKER_01 33:39

It's definitely a possibility, and some people do use you know the old chat GPT type of uh searching and stuff. Um, and um I think it's got a little way to go yet, because I think there is a you know, we've I mean, if you take right move, you know, that's if we went to a hundred people down the high street and spoke to them about searching for property, 99 would probably say right move, and one might say chat GPT just at this moment in time, you know. But that can rapidly change. And what we don't know is what the portals may be doing in the background to um make themselves you know more effective in that sort of AI arena. Because I mean, if they're standing still, then they're gonna go out of business, you know. Um, it's just a question of when rather than if.

SPEAKER_02 34:22

And whether they embrace it or block it.

SPEAKER_01 34:24

Yeah, well, they won't be able to block it. Um, you know, it will not be able to be blocked. Um, but of course, a lot of estate agency websites are poor, and actually, you're gonna need to make sure that your website is produced in such a way that it will be found by the you know by the AI bots and whatever else. But I think that that you know, that will undoubtedly happen. How how much and how quickly, I'm afraid, you know, bigger brains than mine will probably have a you know a stronger view. Um, I'm convinced it will you know start to evolve. We've already got obviously some players in the estate agency market. You will have met, you know, Mel McAlian and various other people are you know coming up with sort of various bits and pieces. So it's going to happen. It's going to happen. Um change inevitably and surprisingly. When I set up my business in 2003, off the back of my MBA that predicted the arrivals of the you know, the poem, I thought, you know, the next five years, this is where it's going to be. And if I'm perfectly honest, it took 20.

SPEAKER_02 35:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:28

Um and I think, you know, we may, we're talking about it now, I'm thinking, oh, this is the next five years, and some of it will be, but I think it might be 10 or 20 before it really sort of beds down. Um, where I think the big changes will be, it will be in pulling the conveyancing process, the sale process, uh, and whatever under one roof more easily, um, so that there's less separation. So the integration that we've all talked about, and to a certain extent, been working with Kozut and all of these different people trying to join the sort of join the dots, that may happen much more rapidly. Um, and so, and there will then be a whole series of consolidations and mergers and and what are business models to make a more effective business model. I think that that might start to happen much more rapidly.

SPEAKER_02 36:19

I mean, you kind of preempted my uh penultimate question, which is uh just whether you recognize an industry that that's on the verge of this evolution. Uh and you know, certainly my own view is that uh people seem to be much more accepting of the possibility of change than they've ever been before.

SPEAKER_01 36:44

Well, we we now have um the next generation of home buyers, Gen Z, as they affectionately call. These are the people who don't like to speak to anybody and want to do everything via WhatsApp and uh and whatever else. They're not yet the home buyers generally, but they very rapidly will be. They are in the rental market now, but they are in the next 10 years we'll see Gen Z be the first-time buyers and whatever of the next um millennia, you know, the next move. Um they have a completely different view of how things work. They actually go out of their way almost not to speak to people. I mean, I think it's sad, and I think that there's some issues there, but nevertheless, they this is the generation that's grown up through COVID and whatever else. Um, and here we are, we're on a Teams call making doing this podcast. Um, you know, we we couldn't have done that 15 years ago or whatever. So, you know, these things are are happening. Um, and I think it will be ultimately, it's always driven by what the customer wants. Um, most estate agents are using WhatsApp now as a communication tool with um with their customers. There are some serious issues I I have with it from the point of view of GDPR, um, and that with staff using their own phones with data on, and well, so I think there are some potential risk areas there for businesses. Um, but nevertheless, it's a it's a channel that people um like uh to use. And uh I think we've got to be mindful of, you know, at the end of the day, we're all driven by the customer. Um, you know, we've got to provide the customer with you know not only what they want, but how they want it.

SPEAKER_02 38:29

It's tricky to condense 50 years of experience into a reasonably short uh podcast, but uh, we've given it our best shot, Mike. I I'm I'm gonna finish off the discussion by handing you a magic wand and saying to you, if you were to wave it uh in a in a way, how would you wave it to change, update, evolutionize, revolutionize uh the property market of today so that it's fit for purpose for tomorrow?

SPEAKER_01 38:59

I would um I think fundamentally I would want to see a raising of standards, however that was achieved. And that doesn't necessarily mean, for example, in a state of seeing the introduction of Roper, which is this qualifications for everybody, but that might be part of it. Um, I would like to see fees higher because I think unless fees are higher, there just won't be the money in the process to be able to do anything. Um, and therefore, some people have got to dig their heels in and say, my fee is at this level. People don't like doing that because then if there's always somebody will come along and undercut. So we may need to see some mandation on qualifications, we may need to see some mandation on process, i.e., instructing, for example, conveyances at the outset of a transaction, in order to force agents and conveyances to raise their fees and use the money to invest in people, processes, technology. It's too slow at the moment. That change is too slow, and um, and it's too fragmented, it's a cottage industry, you know. I mean, and the it's a cottage industry in a state agency, it's a cottage industry in conveyancy, handful of big players, and then it becomes pretty small fairly quickly. Um, and I'm afraid there will be winners and losers. Um, and that's just the way it way it is. Um people have still got so to live somewhere, it's a question of how they get there. Um, you know, the public hate the process. It's a you know, it's a necessary evil, um, and we need to find some better ways of doing it. Um, I've you know, I have some views, but I probably haven't got all the answers. Well, I've been trying, I've been trying for 50 years.

SPEAKER_02 40:47

It's it's been great to have you on the podcast, Mike. Thank you so much for sharing uh your experience and your insight as well. And I hope I hope people listening have taken a little bit away from today as well. So thanks so much for joining.

SPEAKER_01 40:59

Thank you very much, David.

SPEAKER_02 41:00

My pleasure. The Today's Conveyancer Podcast is available on your preferred podcast provider. It's also available on today'sconveyancer.co.uk. My thanks to Mike. Thank you as ever for listening, and we'll see you again soon.

SPEAKER_00 41:16

You're listening to the Today's Conveyancer Podcast, the leading source of information for residential property lawyers in England and Wales. Don't forget to subscribe and sign up to our free newsletter at today'sconveyancer.co.uk. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.