The volume of home sales is already down by around 70 per cent on this time last year so the potential earnings of any estate agent has crashed and many are struggling to survive. A colleague reported earlier that each of the 12,000 estate agents in the country would only sell on average 2 to 3 properties per month in August which is certainly not a level that would be sustainable for very long.

 

One of our contacts on the ground reports unofficially that 2 staff have already been lost from each of the many estate agencies in Guildford, Surrey. If you multiply that up for the rest of the country then around 24,000 staff working in estate agents could already have lost their jobs. We find it very surprising that this situation has not been reported more widely in the press so far.

 

But the sorry state of affairs is set to get even worse on the back of the uncertainty around the future of stamp duty. The Chancellor Alistair Darling has refused to commit one way or the other and so many purchasers are now putting their deals on hold until they get some clarification. Stamp duty amounts to just over 2000 pounds for the average house in the UK and for the average detached property the cost rises to over 10,000 pounds so it's no surprise that house buyers are happy to put off deals and wait to see if there are going to be any concessions in the scheme. But these meanderings by Darling are just adding to the woes of estate agents, who can see even those 2 or 3 sales per month disappearing fast.