What’s bad for slick estate agents is good for working Londoners

Those twice-weekly sales emails from Foxtons that the recent GDPR clean-up has failed to stop have lately been spattered with the words ‘recent price reduction’ in big red capitals. Hence no surprise that the glossy estate agent and bellwether of London residential property has just reported a first-half loss of £2.8 million, compared to £3.8 million profit in the first half of last year and reflecting a sharp drop in sales revenues. Chief executive Nic Budden says his marketplace ‘is undergoing a sustained period of very low activity levels’.

Foxtons’ flotation in 2013 at an absurd valuation of £650 million was the strongest possible indicator of overheating house prices at the time; likewise, its £360 million sale by founder Jon Hunt to private equity investors at the very peak of the previous boom in 2007. Today its market capitalisation is just £140 million, the shares having been on a downward slide since stamp duty rises began to bite in 2015.