…actually, I lie, it’s Cherie. Has the Chesh finally lost his marbles (alongside his hair and Kylie Minogue’s ‘phone number), I hear you ask? Well no, not exactly. But as I typed the headline and committed it to ‘print’, it must be true. Just like the same El Tone in his September dossier back in 2002 wrote that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and had the capability to launch an attack within 45 minutes. We went to war on that one, so lurid and possibly exaggerated claims about selling houses pale into insignificance. Although the online agent purplebricks (PB) would beg to differ. This week PB announced that that they are now generating a,”maiden profit” (no, I have never heard the phrase either). Within the same statement, their CEO Michael Bruce offered the somewhat mind-boggling quote that, “…we are agreeing a sale every 16 minutes, 24 hours a day…” Really? Boy scout’s honour, cross my heart really? I mean, really? In order to compute this, I dragged out the abacus and worked out that with the sales: time ratio that he offered, that equates to 32,850 sales a year, 90 sales a day with 3.75 per hour. These figures make Pinkmove, Savills and anyone else in between look like a right bunch of slackers. The truth is out there as Mulder and Scully tried on a weekly basis to prove. (Incidentally, I never knew until recently, that his sister had been abducted by aliens). I digress. City analysts have shown that PB only sell 5% of their listed stock. To produce the figures quoted by their CEO , this means that they must list 657,000 houses a year, that’s 1800 a day, 75 an hour and one listing every 1.25 minutes. FFS. Add these figures to the statement made by Portico, the Wetsminster agent that transaction levels are down 60% in London and PB mist be selling just about every house that comes on the market in London. Back to Mulder who claimed, “I saw Elvis in a potato chip once”. A signed photo of the Chesh if you can name the episode.
