A Taste Of Honey

A thousand offices closed.

The property market in the Balearics may be holding its own in terms of property values (though even these are under pressure), but the fall in activity has taken its toll on the property retail chain. The number of estate agent offices that have closed since last summer stands at around 1,000. That’s an awful lot of offices. But it will come as little surprise. The proliferation of estate agencies was unsustainable. Indeed it is questionable whether, even in better times, that proliferation was supportable.

So many businesses wanted a bit of the Mallorcan property honeypot. They saw high (often overpriced) property values, low interest rates, strong demand locally and from abroad. They all wanted to buzz around the pot and have a good lick. It would be wrong to portray most estate agents here as anything other than professional, but it would be equally correct to portray some as chancers, wide boys and johnnys-come-lately. There are people knocking around here who are not estate agents, who have no qualifications and yet who “do some property business”. Everyone wants his or her finger in that pot. But now the honey doesn’t taste so sweet.

That there was over-supply in the number of estate agencies is undeniable. The island is dogged by market inefficiencies in terms of supply. The same problem exists within the restaurant business. The shakeout in the property retail chain was inevitable.

At the high end of the market, certain agencies are likely to survive the current slowdown as these agencies tend to have the big-ticket properties that are immune to a property bear market as potential purchasers are themselves largely immune to the economic circumstances that cause it. The problem exists more at the middle and low ends of the market, over which the majority of the agencies grapple.

There is a further problem, one caused by such high supply of agencies. Their differentiation, their own selling points. That the same property can be marketed by several agencies only serves to reduce even more any differentiation. All the same sort of agency, all selling the same properties. To stand out in such a competitive and homogeneous market is a huge challenge. The marketing of the agency itself is every bit as important as the marketing of the individual property. One agency chain I know (Menorcan) gained pre-eminence in the market more or less on the back of its advertising and marketing alone. But with a slow market, such marketing investment becomes difficult. One fancies there will yet be more closures, even if there is some prediction that the market will pick up later this year. I wouldn’t be so sure.


FOOTBALL
A bit of football stuff. Real Mallorca knocked Real Madrid out of the Spanish equivalent of the FA Cup on Wednesday evening, winning away at the Bernabéu Stadium. The local papers are of course full of it. Four pages in today’s “Ultima Hora” are devoted to Mallorca’s goalkeeper Miquel Moya, the hero of the evening, who hails from Binissalem and is now dubbed “Sant Moya”. But the best of all this is reserved for the reaction of Madrid’s coach, the German Bernd Schuster, who, in an exchange at the final whistle, said to Mallorca’s coach Gregorio Manzano “ya has conseguido lo que querías, paleto provinciano”, which is best translated as “you’ve now got what you wanted, country bumpkin*”. Nothing like a bit of graciousness in defeat.

(* I wrote this and thus did the translation in the morning. Later I read some of Ian McEwan’s “On Chesil Beach”. I read the part in which Florence calls Edward a “country bumpkin”. How many years is it since I last encountered this expression? And then twice on the same day. Moreover, having decided on today’s title, what film did Florence and Edward attend in the part I then read? Yes, “A Taste Of Honey”. Very strange.)


QUIZ
Yesterday – “The Sound Of Music”. Today’s title – a few to choose from. The trumpeting and the Scouser versions are probably the best known.

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