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Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Tenants bid for property

The latest 're-invention' of the rental property world is a website that allows tenants to bid for rental property in the same way as those buying a property at auction.

The new website is called thepropertybid.com. It's the 'brainwave' of Jonathan Ambrose a building surveyor. Good luck to him, we need more people prepared to give business a go and have the courage of their conviction. Two potential problems with his website the first is scale. It will only work if enough people use it and there the rub. Tenants and landlords will only use it if they can see that enough properties and tenants are utilising it first. The other issue is that it only really works where there is excess demand for rental property; say in the centre of London. Otherwise the lack of bidding activity is not really going to set a fair market rent.

The website appears to have been a previous winner of the 2010 letting awards. This goes to prove another one of my theories. Not all award winners are winners or is this just the embittered view of a website owner who has never won one!

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3 comments:

Paul Routledge said...

A great Idea can we assume that the prospective tenant can bid either up or down depending on whether the market is bull or bear?.

Paul
LandlordRferencing.co.uk

James Black said...

No looks like they set a minimum price and people can.bid on top of that price. It's waiting to fail unless there is a massively high demand for the house. Or the rent is low to start with

Anonymous said...

Money isn't everything!
Anyone can enter a bid to get the property and then not pay the rent.