The Industry Never Stands Still with Ed Mead

How much has the property industry really changed over the last 50 years?

In this episode of *The Viking Chats*, Kristjan sits down with one of the industry's most recognisable figures, Ed Mead. From his early days learning the ropes in London's estate agency scene during the 1970s, through helping build Douglas & Gordon into one of the capital's best-known brands, to founding Viewber and becoming one of property's most respected commentators, Ed has experienced almost every major shift the industry has gone through.

As the episode title suggests, one thing has remained constant throughout his career.The industry never stands still.

This is a conversation about what changes, what doesn't, and why the businesses that thrive are usually the ones prepared to evolve.

Ed reflects on what made Douglas & Gordon different during its growth years, the importance of having great mentors early in your career, and why maintaining a healthy balance between work and life was one of the secrets to enjoying such a long career in agency.

The discussion then moves into the creation of Viewber. Originally conceived as a way of solving a simple problem—how to cover more viewings outside normal office hours—it quickly evolved into something much bigger. Today, Viewber supports auction houses, estate agents, institutional landlords, social housing providers and property professionals across the UK through a nationwide network of thousands of local property representatives.

Along the way, Kristjan and Ed explore why some technology businesses flourish while others disappear, why so much PropTech has historically been built by people who never truly understood agency, and how AI is changing not just the products we build but the speed at which businesses can innovate.

There is also plenty of discussion around one of the industry's biggest talking points: regulation.

From the Renters' Rights Bill and increasing compliance obligations to taxation, housing policy and the ever-changing political landscape, Kristjan and Ed debate whether governments genuinely understand the unintended consequences of housing legislation. They discuss the growing professionalism of the lettings sector, the changing profile of landlords, and why good intentions don't always produce good outcomes.

The conversation also tackles qualification, training and professional standards within agency. Having once supported mandatory qualifications, Ed explains why his thinking has changed over the years, arguing that while poor operators undoubtedly exist, the overwhelming majority of agents are honest, hardworking professionals who care deeply about their clients.

It's a refreshingly balanced discussion that avoids easy headlines in favour of thoughtful debate.

Perhaps most importantly, this episode is about perspective.

Ed has seen markets boom and crash. He's watched business models come and go. He's worked in traditional agency, built a successful technology company and advised the industry through decades of change. That experience gives him a unique vantage point on where the property sector has been—and where it may be heading next.

Whether you're an estate agent, letting agent, PropTech founder, supplier or simply someone fascinated by how industries evolve, this episode offers a rare opportunity to hear from someone who has spent half a century adapting to change without ever losing sight of the fundamentals.

Because in property, just when you think you've seen everything...The industry never stands still.

Transcript

I’m delighted to be joined today by Ed Mead, editor. Thanks for joining me. Thank you very much, Kristjan. Nice to be here. Even though I am in Shoreditch and I've come all the way from Dorset on a motorbike, which explains why I'm looking perhaps a little bit hot, a little bit toasty. Now, for those who maybe haven't been in the industry that much or necessarily weren't involved, particularly in the London market. Um, can you give us a little bit who is, who is Ed Mead? That's a little bit of the background. Well, um, I said I've just come from Dorset. Funnily enough, I've moved back down to live in Dorset. I was born in Dorset, but I left to London when I was about nineteen. And um I was an estate agent in London in the seventies. 80s 90s noughties tens, pretty much up to the end of the tens really. And um, at the end of that process, I finally off we were talking just before this, and I was very, very lucky in the late seventies and early eighties to have a couple of the best bosses in the industry. Andrew Langton from Aylesford and a lady called Rebecca Reid, who sadly is no longer with us. Um, who ran a company called Reid Cunningham. But they were both fabulous at teaching you not the old fashioned boring techniques of agency, but. But well, they did in so far as they taught you the ethics and who you're acting for. But they were very good at giving you your, uh, keeping you on a long leash so you could get out there and really do stuff. So I was very, very lucky I had them, but I ended up, um, as one of the team running Douglas and Gordon in from the late nineties into the early tens. And I thoroughly enjoyed it. Absolutely loved it. Um, but as time, I mean, the last couple of years of the global financial crisis must have been interesting. But I imagine before that, I mean, it was a business that we really admired. I always, you know, had one eye on you guys. Well, the managing director, Ivor Dickinson, was absolutely fantastic. Again. Sadly, he's no longer with us. He had a real eye for marketing. So people always remembered some of the extraordinary advertising we used to do, which was great. You did do some brilliant stuff. And the other thing was that Douglas and Gordon was not a business that was run for major profit. It wasn't a foxtons. We made money, but not in the way that Foxtons did. So. And it's funny you mentioned Foxtons because I always kind of viewed you as a maybe ethical isn't the right word, but I at the time, I always viewed you as a slightly more ethical or less cutthroat version of Foxtons a little bit more fun. Well, interestingly, when I was running, when I was running the Chelsea office, which was the best period of my life from nineteen ninety six through to, Crikey, the late two thousand. Um, my biggest competitor was Pete Rawlings, who was running the office. He and Pete and I, um, he used to get up at five o'clock, drive to London in his Range Rover, be working till nine, drive home. He'd do that six days a week. He was amazing. And he deserves all the success he's had. But I used to have lunch with him once a month. And he and I used to say, where have you been? On holiday. And I'd been off doing, you know, I had a. Well, I think I would describe as a balance. And I do think that's saying that a lot of people miss these days the balance between work and play, and I was always very good at that. I'm sure some of my old compadres from Dag would say that I had that too much on the balance of holiday side, but so I was very lucky. So I went through that whole process. And then, as you say, post the financial crisis, central London, which I'd always worked in. So I'd always been in Chelsea really. It started to lose its shine a bit. And if you go through Chelsea these days, no one really lives in Chelsea anymore. The Kings Road is busy on a on a daily basis, but the rest of it's pretty dead. Yeah, I think that's about to change, by the way. We can talk about that. But anyway, that's another thing entirely because we all know that central London prices are going through the floor at the moment. Um, but the, the shareholders of London decided it was time to sell the business. And what we did was started as a rental business in nineteen fifty eight. So it's interesting that I did not know because that's that's pretty unusual. Yeah. And particularly for them. Absolutely. Well, it was at the time it was unheard of. You know, the idea of having a rental agency just didn't happen. So when Douglas Gordon Pirie, the guy that founded it, started it. He was an ex-diplomat and he well connected. So he was putting people into residences in central London. So when I joined, we bought the business into a, you know, twenty office operation, and we ended up selling it to Foxtons all that's public knowledge. So I had actually left a couple of years before that, um, because the business was just changing and I wasn't enjoying it, but also because my wife, mainly my wife, I have to say, Jamie had come up with an idea for, um, one of the things we discovered was a problem at D and G, which was that we had so many people who wanted to see properties at weekends and in the evenings, and we just never accommodate them. Yeah. You know, each office had one member of staff who was tasked to do weekend viewings, but they only worked Saturdays. Their diary was full by Monday, you know, they couldn't do it. So we had the idea of coming up with some sort of a temp thing. We couldn't quite work out what it was, so we thought, right, let's go and get it started. and, um, Jamie was still working for Savills at the time and carried on working. She was doing their all their PR for them. And so I started the business in two thousand and late twenty sixteen, early two thousand. And this Veba, this is Veba. Yeah. And um, actually almost extraordinarily, it started to sort of work quite quickly, not in the way we thought, which I'll talk about in a minute. But what it did do was give me an extraordinary insight into both sides at the time. I mean, you, you were one of the very early people, again, into sort of prop tech in inverted commas. But there were a lot of others, you know, there was good Lord and keen s and and all these businesses that were starting up at the time, most of them were the ones I've just mentioned are still here, but a lot of them aren't here anymore. Yeah. So I had this extraordinary journey where I started to see all of what what was going on in proptech, and I knew what was going on on the agency side. And an awful lot of people who got into property didn't really know about the property side. They were coming up with these great ideas, but what they'd never done was check that they actually were needed in the industry. Well, a lot of it was, was, was from a consumer experience. Right. And they would they would have they would have a crappy experience. It's nothing wrong with that. But I think there wasn't that step of, okay, well, I've never worked in an agency, so maybe there's a reason it's a bit crap or maybe there's, you know. Yeah. Um, and I think, yeah, I think that's very true. And I think it's still true to this day. Um, and I think with the prevalence of AI now and how easy it is to code stuff, I mean, my God, I mean, I probably get offered an AI chat bot every other day from some other seller. Well, it's definitely changed. It's changed. I'll talk about Uber a little bit later, but, but, um, because it's changed the way we do things or can do things, but, um, so it was a fascinating journey. So the business started to take off. I got a great business partner, a guy called Marcus, who was very good at the sort of tech and corporate sort of side of things, didn't know the industry, but that was my bent. So grew the business. A lot of hard work. I mean, a lot of people said to me, what are you doing? I was in my mid fifties thinking, why are you starting? Why am I starting a business again? And I actually thought it would be a little bit of a sort of hobby. Business is a terrible expression, but nevertheless, I thought it would be something that would sort of keep me interested. But it took off not quite like a rocket, but it, it moved into verticals. Busy. Yeah, it definitely kept me busy. And I would say I was very lucky in some ways in that a lot of people, particularly my chairman, Richard Cunningham, who's a fantastic guy, he used to get really annoyed because what I tended to do was to work very, very hard fifty percent of the time, and f about the other fifty percent of the time, say fishing, biking. It was always really important to me to have downtime. And because I was a bit older, I needed to do that. So he was furious that I was building up a business and having some fun whilst doing it at the same time. Which was which was which, which was great. And again, I'll come on to why that sort of changing now. I mean, you know, Uber has has leached into areas we didn't think it would would do the agency world as you've discovered and I'm sure no tends to be run by lots and lots of middle aged men like me who have one to two offices and they're very difficult to aggregate. They all want to do their own thing. They've done their own thing for years. The difference now is that there are more younger people like you coming through, who are much more tech savvy. The Amazon generation, if I can put it like that. They understand that tech can help, whereas the older generation like me thought, no, no, thanks very much. That's a lovely idea, but we're okay. Thanks. Yeah. So whereas we thought the agency world would go, this is great. It's like having that Savills Strutt and Parker Knight Frank weekend staff, but on demand. Yeah, they didn't really think that several did, but not a lot. Yeah. What really took off was the auction business. Yeah. So auctions up until then, you know, if you had, if you were a business like Savills and you had an because obviously that that marketplace as well has boomed in that, well, it has boomed. But I would venture to suggest in a very modest way that it's boomed quite a lot because of what we do. Yeah. Because up until then, if you were an auction house based in London, say, or even a fast buy and sell operation based in London, which a lot of how the hell do you do an open house for an open house in Norfolk? It used to take a lot of organization, and you had to arrange someone to go and do the pictures, show it, do key handovers where the key is going to be held, probably employ local agent, give them half the fee. Now, if Uber does everything where in every postcode in the UK, seven thousand people all over the UK able to do. Doesn't matter whether it's a photograph of a property, a marketing pack. So the auctioneers could. They found straight away. Several of them went no, no, no were fine. And then they tried us and they went, oh my God, this is revolutionary. Yeah. And some businesses were going. Some of the big businesses have trebled their output in the fees they make compared to agency fees. Well, they haven't got half the fees away. You know they can they for two hundred and fifty quid they can get a preview if necessary. So they can get someone to go along and walk around and say, yeah, we'll take that on. They can. Then we can do the marketing packs, we can do all the viewings. We can do any inspections, handle the keys and do the key. HanDovers don't even have to turn up all for an allotted all for an allotted two hundred and fifty. They don't have to do anything. So the ability for so auctioneers was, was a very, very quick win for us. And we now do it for all the top auctioneers in the UK. Um fast Buy and sell is a very small part of the market. But again, a lot of people these days, if you, if you sell, want to sell a house, the first thing you get is all those ads at the top from people offering you seventy five percent of value. But again, that's, that's something that we could help with very much. But we've taken a lot longer to get into the agency world, but also social housing. Yeah. Compliance, as you know, is right on us. Um, you've got Grenfell, all those things coming on Awaabs law next year, all the stuff that that needs an audit trail of inspection. Yeah. And most people just don't have, I mean the only competition that Riba has for this sort of stuff really is, is in-house resource. And most of the people who handle this are self don't have that resource. So it was a very long journey discovering it wasn't terribly edifying. I didn't find the the journey into proptech, learning how agents work. I didn't find it that nice, interesting word, but I found it rather I thought, My God, is that really how it works? But that now is changing. There are a lot of young. Yeah, really young. Not gung ho is the wrong word, but a lot of really savvy people now taking over or managing the agencies, and it is moving to a different sort of level. Um, also at the time when I started, you had some of the big online agents, as we call, as we used to call them in those days starting up. And they obviously struggled. They created a lot of problems with people in the, in the industry, but it was fascinating to see how that's developed and what's been going on with it. And clearly a lot of them are still around. So it's not it's not like they much to many people's. Well, but the thing is, there's no reason why there shouldn't be a choice for people. Oh, no. And and listen, even in the early days, even when when purple bricks were in their ascendancy and everyone was panicking a little bit, I'd still it was it was the modern version of a newspaper advert, right? It was fundamentally, you know, no one reads loot anymore. No one goes and reads a bulletin board in their local newsagent. That is what fundamentally that's simplifying it massively. But fundamentally that's what I saw in online agent ads was was, was just the evolution of that. Well, they struggled to do the rest of it. And what they were trying to do was replicate the ordinary agency experience on the cheap. Well, this is it. They tried to replicate that. They were the same, but for a fraction of the price, rather than be like, hey, you know, you don't have to spend that much money. You could get less for much less. Well, I always think that there's a very strong reason some people require their hands held all the way through it, and some people know exactly what they're doing. They only need little bits. The problem in the past is that if you wanted to get an agent on board, you paid them two percent and you got you probably you might not have needed seventy five percent of what they gave you. So the ability to pick from a menu of stuff you need, do you need viewings? Do you need photos? Do you need the EPK? You might have all of this stuff, you know, so I don't see any problem with having it. And actually, I mean, Purplebricks is a much more technically able business than it was at the beginning. Um, it'll be interesting to see what happens with it because obviously they've got the old team back in again to, you know. Yeah. And there was the article today saying, I mean, this, this will come out in a couple of weeks, but there was an article today, uh, advising that the chap from Carphone Warehouse, His name as a person of control has been removed from the company details, but his venture vehicle is there. Freston ventures. Yeah, but, um. But their accounts are a month late. Yeah, well, it'll be interesting to see what happens. I think they've what they cannot afford to do purplebricks is squander what is a spectacularly well-known consumer brand. Yes. So from that perspective, they've they've spent the B2C money on the advertising. So people know who they are, which is why they did the right decision to, to, I think, let strike. Yeah. Disappear as a brand that never I never had the market penetration of purple bricks to understand exactly what works and what doesn't. I have my own opinions. I've made this quite clear to the guys there because clearly they've interacted with us a lot because we provide a service for those people. But they, you know, for those type of agents. So, um, overall, the journey for me has been fantastic. I've thoroughly enjoyed it. Uh, you know, our paths have crossed often. There are a number of us who've been going through the same sort of process over the last ten years or so. I mean, the issue for me is that Uber has grown from being a startup through being an SME into a successful business now. You know, we're turning over ten million plus. You know, we're making seven thousand people around the country in the UK. Got to keep them busy able to do jobs. I mean again you say keep them busy. The the people we have don't really care whether they do the jobs or not. The whole point is we've tapped into this massive um it's not an underclass at all, but a massive substrata of people who had sort of been forgotten about, who can now do a bit of extra work when they feel like it. Yeah. And so our problem as a business is, you know, we're profitable. Very good. Gross margin. Most of it is recurring revenue as well because the majority of our people have never left. We have never lost a client. We've never lost a big client because once they start with us, they just think, this is great. Yeah. I mean, and the only way someone leaves us is if they go bust. Yeah. So, I mean, you know that. So and they usually get acquired by another client anyway. Yeah. So you know, precisely. So so from that point of view, our, our, our issue really is that I think we've got as far as I can take the business at the moment. And we really are looking now for someone to take it to the next stage. Now, whether that's someone else investing in the business, whether it's a replacement for me, you know, whatever it is, there's such an opportunity with Veba. So we're investigating that at the moment to see where we go next. Um, but it's against a backdrop. If you imagine a business like ours, you're hugely invested in compliance and, and all the stuff that goes with lettings, but the whole it's a fascinating time. I mean, you know, people will be watching this. I don't know when, but yesterday was when Burnham was sworn in as the new prime minister. And clearly he's got a whole new team. Well, I say a whole new team. They're the old faces. But back in in having been moved around a bit. Yeah, we've got Angela Rayner again. So it'll be interesting to see whether this twenty third housing Minister in nineteen years or whatever the equation is, will actually do anything different because most people, when they come in, they think, yeah, let's go, let's go and do something fresh and groovy. But we haven't had many come back. No, well, we haven't had many come back. But the fact is, it's a brief I mean, it's a mildly ironic brief for Angela Rayner to have come back into. Obviously, given what happened to her when she left government last time around. But nevertheless, um, there is so much of an opportunity. I did a bit of a rant in LinkedIn on LinkedIn yesterday about the my concern about some of this new regime's statements about equalising CGT with income tax, this sort of stuff. And if every government seems to come to power saying that they want to build, build, build, and then they and then they don't don't don't they fuck it up, you know, and they don't. We are we are incredibly good at making building houses, looking in, make it we make it look insanely difficult. Well, some of the things that Andy Burnham has suggested, like forcing, forcing public bodies to give up land. You know, an awful lot of hospitals. If you go to a hospital, they own a lot of land. The NHS. But they'll say we might build a hospital over there. So I'm not sure you can get you can take that. But there are an awful lot of car parks, for instance, where you could build flats above the car parks. Yeah. Let nurses live there. There's a whole load of stuff he could do. The main problem is that even if you want to, even if government wants to create a whole load of housing, that's. There's got to be investment, private investment to back it up. Yeah. And not only do you have to have people investing, they've got to get a decent return. I mean, my bugbear with this is my my dad built up a business in property in the fifties, sixties 70s. And when he came to sell it in nineteen seventy eight, it was when the Labour Party decided that they were going to put the top rate of tax to eighty, eighty three percent, eighty three percent. And if your income came from what they described as unearned income from a property, there was a fifteen percent super tax. So if my father sold his business at the time. In nineteen seventy eight, he would have received two pence in the pound for his business. So he went to live in France. Can you imagine that? Imagine how mad it is to think that France has a lower tax regime than the than the UK did? And I just have this horrible feeling that the same thing is going to happen again. And we know that Rachel Reeves has driven a load of people away with all the changes in tax she's made. And, you know, I'm not going to get into the niceties of Non-doms and all that sort of stuff, but but there's clearly been an exodus of the kind of people who we want to keep in this country. And it really worries me that at a time when we need to be investing, particularly in property, UK property PLC is worth about ten percent of UK plc. Yeah. So it's a really big sector. And if they dissuade people from investing, which they would do if CGT was the same as income tax, why would people bother to, to to risk money to go and get a highly paid job somewhere. Yeah. And look, I think, I think look, I am I am a believer that something does need to happen with the tax landscape in terms of balancing out inequality. What that is, I'm not quite sure yet. But I think what we often find with government, as we've seen with the Renters Rights Act, is simplistic, well-intentioned ideas that because they are simplistic and based on good intentions and little else, often obfuscate what their objective is. You know, as we know, the Renters Rights Act, whilst it is going to improve elements of the industry, as we know from the from from all the legislation that's come over the last ten, fifteen years. I mean, look, generally it professionalizes the market. I don't think that's anything to, uh, to, to balk at. Um, but, um, you know, if you look at the Renters Rights Act purely from a renter's perspective. It will improve some, but I would actually argue it's caused a lot more problems for tenants than it is solved. Okay. Um, well, that's for another day. Yeah, yeah, but I mean, but bizarre things in there, like extending rent arrears and extending notice, like why would, why would you want to make that process longer for a tenant that is already in duress? Like, you know, that to me is a mystery. Um, you know, and, and the reality is, is that they were warned repeatedly through the Tory campaign and then the Labour policy as well was a lot of their well-intentioned things are going to impact the most vulnerable tenants. Did you feel their consultancy period was right? Did you feel that they did enough? So in the initial consultancy with the Tories, with the renters, with the rent reform bill, was it? Yeah, it was the rent reform bill they called it originally. Um they, think I was actually really impressed with that was because for the first time as a small independent agent, I saw them interacting with small independent agents, whereas historically government would typically reach out to the big boys and maybe a couple of other big independents. And you were really they were really the lucky ones to get in a room if they did. Um, I felt like throughout that, and to a certain extent in, into the labor one, although I felt the labor consultancies were more papers, lip service, I, I felt like they were kind of sat in front of the room, but there wasn't really a discussion to be had they decided what they were going to do. Well, that's the reason I ask you is because I do wonder, I mean, one of the things they could do, or Angela Rayner could do is to turn around to people in the industry, is to get people in and sit down around the table and say, right, what do you think I you're the people that know the industry. What do you think we should do? I mean, but I just think that's going to happen. They just they don't really want to hear from us because the default position is that anything we say is negative is prefaced fundamentally on our own income and benefit. Well, and that was that. I think that was the problem I had throughout it was that, you know, there were some very, very honest feedback from many people within our industry. I mean, we we had them attend several Zoopla lettings advisory board meetings, and they were tlic council meetings and all sorts of things with all the different letters and abbreviations you can think of. Um, but what I found was a lot of the very legitimate. Be careful if you do this, what you probably don't realize is you're going to cause this, this and this. And often it was dismissed that. Oh yeah, but you're saying that because that impacts your bottom line. So you're talking about vested interests. Yeah. Do you know something? Isn't it funny? So so going back to my I, I used to there was a stage you probably you won't remember this, but back in the late nineteen nineties, I was lucky enough to. Right as the Sunday Times property expert every week, and I wrote as the Sunday Telegraph property expert or not, the Sunday. The Telegraph, I had a. I had a thing, and they used to have a magazine before the financial crisis. They had a magazine. Um and I was the agent provocateur. That's right. And I used to write every week. I used to write every week, seven hundred and fifty words in the Sunday Times and seven hundred fifty words in the Telegraph, which I can do all day. Yeah. I'm nothing like the same as A.A. Gill was, but AA Gill was fantastic at knocking out seven hundred and fifty word pieces, and I was always able to knock those out, so I'd. I'd. I'd written for the for the Sunday Times and the Telegraph and I, I had a voice, you know, I was able to, to, to write stuff and I, you know, the, the editors, um cherry was fantastic at the Telegraph and Helen Davies at the Sunday Times was great. And they pretty much let me write what I wanted to, but I did have vested interests. So at the time I was I was at D and G, and I couldn't really denigrate the industry too much or some of those practices because they made us all look bad. And similarly, since then, I've had a you know, if I put a thing up on LinkedIn, it'll get thirty, forty thousand views and I can have plenty of umph behind it. But what I can't do is necessarily be rude about not rude, but odd, completely honest about people I sometimes like to be completely honest about because it might impact my bottom line. Exactly as you say. And it's one of the reasons why, if I move on from Uber and Uber gets sold or whatever it is, I would love to be freed to sort of say just, yeah. And I don't want to be rude about people because of course, that that vested interest can be brutally honest without being rude. You can, I think you can call behaviors and attitudes, which actually without because fundamentally, if that is how a person organization, entity is Entities behaving. Yeah, but it's it's not like it. It's annoying in some ways. I mean, you know, I, I was on the board of the Property Ombudsman for years. I'm now on their industry forum. And obviously Richard Best, Lord best has been doing this Roper thing for a long, long time about the registration of property agents, about getting agents to be qualified, etc., etc. and it's always slightly irritated me. I mean, when it was fifteen years ago, I was all for it. I thought, yeah, agents need to be qualified. And I didn't really sort of. Yeah, I've always been on the fence. Well, I didn't really think about it, but I just assumed because I was a I mean, I was a frics and all that, I thought, yeah, let them eat cake. You know, they should all go out and do it, do the same thing. But actually I completely flipped on that. And I do not think that agents need to be qualified. The vast majority do a fantastic job. And it's it's the same old story in any industry or most industries. Certainly in our industry, the majority of people are well meaning honest, hardworking. They do the right thing. They know who they're acting for. But you get some really rotten eggs in it that just give the whole thing a bad name. And that's where a lot of the legislation comes from. And I didn't used to listen to people like Henry Pryor banging on, you know, he's obviously a buying agent. So he used to bang on about how he didn't think agents needed to, to, to do any of this stuff. Um, because, you know, they, most of them were absolutely fine. I now agree with him. I do think that most people are fine. Don't, don't need that. So I think it's a, I think we, I mean, if we go full circle back to the compliance thing where we started talking about, well, my, my concern with it as well is most of the people I know and a lot of the people that I really respect in the industry fell into it. They didn't go well because they weren't required to. Um, but they didn't go and get a degree. They didn't go and get a certificate in professional estate agency to launch that career. And I, I, I fear for our industry, it's not an industry that many people grow up aspiring to be part of. They stumble into it and then, much to their surprise. I was like that. I fall in love. I did a mechanical engineering degree and I think if we over professionalize it, what we risk is just this. This like pulling up the ladder. People just won't. If they if they have to do this certification and training to find out if they like it, if they're any good. Is there a business they want to work in? I, you know, I think we've already got a bit of a problem with talent. Um, but I think that would massively amplify it. Um, and yeah, and a lot of people that I've seen create businesses as well are varying sizes and successes again, come from that background of stumbling into it. I mean, I've said on many podcasts, Meghan, eighteen, is the only person that I can reel off on my head is the only person I think I've ever met who've, like, from a kid aspired to be an estate agent, because that was kind of what her mum instilled in her. And, well, you know, if you lined up twenty eighteen year olds and said, right, who wants to be an agent? You're not going to get any or who's gonna who's about to start his agency in Islington. I mean, I've never seen someone do like a seven year prelude to starting their agency career. But, you know, it's not something, as you say, people people aspire to, which is a real shame because it's a fantastic yeah, it's a fantastic job. You know, no two days are the same. You can make very good money, massively misunderstood massively. But it's also a question for a lot of people who are thinking about getting into agency, and they're not necessarily watching this podcast, but there are so many different skill sets within the industry. You know, we used to have a lot of people at DMG who would be in lettings, and they'd see the sales guys getting a huge check after a very, very good quarter or whatever it was. And they'd say, I want some of that. I want to go into sales, and they'd go along to the guy running, running the sales of that office and say, I want to I want to move across. They'd say, you don't. Okay. Letting is a very different discipline. It's fine. You get your own rewards, but it's not the same. They go, no, I want to go and try it. And six months later they're going, can I go back, please? You know, because it's a very, very different discipline. So there are so many different things you can do, whether it's in property management, whether it's in letting sales. There are all sorts of different bits and pieces you can do. And these days people do employ trainers and and, you know, the tech side is more important. Very interesting to see what happens with AI. I mean, I mentioned at the beginning, you said you talked about AI. I mean, from our point of view at Uber, it's really changed our ability to react to product introduction. You know, in the past, if we wanted to introduce a new product and, and code for and stuff, it was quite, it took quite a lot of time. Now it's bang, it's done in sort of not quite ten minutes, but I mean, you know, it's a much quicker exercise, which leaves you much more able to, to focus on the, the front end of stuff and what you really need to be doing rather than how you're going to get the back end sorted out. So it's been a fascinating journey, I have to say. Um, but, um, I just mentioned that compliance thing. I mean, you know, I'm absolutely convinced that one of the issues that people are going to have over the next two or three years is, is how you resource all of this audit trail, all of this compliance stuff. So if you're meant to be turning up, you know, to do your fire door checks, you're meant to be turning up to do the six monthly checks on damp for damp and mould. You're meant to be checking who's living in the premises, you know, is it the right tenant living in the premises? All this kind of stuff. It's a lot of manpower, you know, and it's been for us. It's been one of our major focuses over the last because we do have that manpower to go and do it. So we've been trying to work out how to focus. We already do a lot of stuff with some of the social housing providers, but it's a very, very slow. I'm not quite sure. It's not, it's not um um, what's the expression when you have to go through the process of being sought out as a supplier, you have to go through um, hell. You know what I mean. You have to qualify as a supplier. Yeah. Yeah. No, I know I haven't gone into the housing sector, but I know they have quite a complex onboarding and tendering process. It's just one of those sort of things where you, you have to do so much and it takes time. The wonderful thing about the social social housing sector is it's much more collaborative. People do tend to sort of share when they have something to kind of get in with one U. Yeah. So so there is quite a lot of that. Whereas obviously on the PR side, it's much more it's much more cut throat and it's much more it's much more competitive, which is fine. That's the way it works, you know? So I mean, you know, we, we have so many areas of interest. The other interesting thing that's happened to us at Uber over the last three years is my chairman and I have had a number of calls from people in the States saying, can you, you know, can we can we do something with you in the States? And I'd love to go and do that, but I've just got no energy to go and do that. I mean, you know, if you want to set up in the States, it was slightly frightens me doing business in the States because the whole thing is so especially with the orange man in charge, you know. Well, yeah. And international things. Interesting. We've actually got an agent who has been on my case for nearly a year now. He wants to he wants to go and roll out depository in South Africa. He's been an agent on ours. He's from South Africa. He's going back to South Africa. You can see a lot of alignments. But like you said, it's um the international thing is, is well, if you've got a man who's been trained from what you a man or woman, obviously a person who's been trained over here in your business and can take it over there, then that's fine. We, we haven't had that luxury. You know, I don't want to send someone to America, but it's so operable over there. It really is. I mean, it makes so much sense to go and do it. Um, so I'm, you know, I rather wish actually I'd done all this thirty years ago, but of course, the tech didn't exist. Yeah. It wasn't possible. So it's sort of quite frustrating really. Um, so yeah, so it's been great to sit and chat. I mean, you know, if we look at so, so you wanted to have a bit of a chat about a couple of things. I mean, we've kind of danced around one of those, which was this constant regulatory shift in lettings. And do we think that's fundamentally beneficial to all parties? I, I, I, I am generally of the mindset that the rental sector is better than it was fifteen, twenty years ago in terms of standards. um, and quality of provision, I think is an agent in an increasingly competitive marketplace. The more technical it becomes, the more opportunity you have to convey your expertise and value. So I actually think for businesses, what I actually have found most bemusing the last few years is how many agents go out publicly on social media and rant about the legislation coming, and scream about how it is the end of the PRS and it is the end of renting as we know it, rather than taking advantage of it and turning it into an opportunity. Well, A they don't take the opportunity and b there then bewildered when twenty percent of their landlords listen to them and put their properties on the market and they go, see, told you, told you they'd all sell up. No, no, they've sold up because you you're the trusted voice. Yeah. They don't, they didn't know what the government was legislating because most landlords don't. It trickles down and they'll they'll learn about it. You see the professionalization because one of our biggest growth areas that viewers, um, single family housing build to rent operators who can no longer buy these big blocks of flats because they're not being built in the same number. So they're having to go into the SFH market and buy the rump end of developments, you know, wherever they can find them, which is, I think, a great market. Of course. I mean, we're definitely seeing a shift into bigger portfolios. Yeah, we're seeing a lot of accidental landlords leave. But a lot of that is more to do with just the time in the market operating in London. We all know what property values have done in London pre twenty fifteen. Yeah. And what they haven't done really since then. Um so you know, look most of those landlords, you know, capital appreciation was always the big win for, for London, but also because of, because of all the changes they're actually, it's actually costing the money to keep them now in, particularly if their mortgage in the past, if there was any finance on it at all, you were, you were probably making just enough to make it worthwhile. Yeah. I mean, I think the objective, You know, with most of our landlords, if they had a reasonable amount of finance involved, you know, our objective, our overview of them, if they asked us to kind of audit their investment would be, look, if it washes its back. Yeah, great. And if you get a little surplus happy days, because every eight years you're going to double, double the value. But doesn't it irritate you that you've only got to mention the word landlord, especially to a politician or to someone who's not a landlord? They automatically think you're Nicholas van Hoogstraten. They think that you're the perception of landlords is phenomenal. And. And do you know what? I'll give you a really interesting example of that. Outside of the sphere of social media and tenant rights groups and everything else. I remember a couple of years ago showing a group of young professionals, I would say mid twenties, a house we've got in Shoreditch, um, are all being supported by mommy and daddy because, because the rent was, was punchy for their income, so they all needed guarantors. Um, but it was what I found really interesting was on this viewing. Like they started off being super pleasant about the property. And as the viewing went on, the way they talked about landlords became more and more, let's give benefit of doubt disparaging. Um, and like I said, there was very much this perception. It got to the point where I was like, sorry, what is it you think? And like, describe to me what you think a typical London landlord is. Oh, twenty plus properties does nothing makes a fortune, a fortune. I said, do you know how many of those I've got on our portfolio? It's like two. However, they make up roughly ten percent of our portfolio. I think people people really do forget that the reason for renting out a property for the vast majority of people is because it keeps the property in good condition, the fabric in good condition, and if, as you say, if it washes its face, it's good news. Some may make a small profit. It amazes me that the build to rent guys make money. I mean, you know, it's been clearly they're aiming at the top end of the market. The really smart people who can afford the money and the extra services and all that sort of stuff. But that's still quite a small area of the market. I mean, whatever it is, one hundred and fifty, two hundred thousand units or whatever it is, and the pipeline keeps getting slower. Yeah. And the pipeline keeps getting slower. But I do think the SFR stuff might change at the single family SFH. Pardon me, the single family housing stuff might change that a bit. I think if a lot of landlords I mean, you know, as I said, we've we've found that a lot of the big players, the autopsy sort of people who come who've come to us because we can do the everything for them, you know, we can literally do everything for them. I mean, it'd be interesting to see how the now the likes of Blackstone and Lloyds Living develop and integrate into the market. Um, well, we're there with all of those guys. You know, we were really at the heart of all of that stuff. So it's a fascinating time. Listen, I mean, you know, we could sit here talking all day. I just, you know, I don't I you, you've, you've, you've allowed me to talk, which is great. Thank you. Um, and I really, um, I've loved my time in property the whole time. I'm not saying it's come to an end, but I just think that particularly for, for, for anyone in business, they'll know that you get to a stage where you think, yeah, the business has actually outgrown me. Yeah. And that's definitely where it's, it's at a, it's at a spectacular stage. But there's so much that worries me about the industry at the moment, not just, well, I think, I think the London property market, I think the London property market has a lot of really big hurdles to overcome at the moment. I think, you know, as we've touched on, you know, capital values as an average in London have barely changed the last ten, twelve years. As you've said, you know, the the prime and super prime market is, is not quite freefall, but it's scary enough in areas, um, you know, a lot of the investors we bought into it, it wasn't about the rental income. It was about the capital appreciation. If you take that out of the market, that's a very good point. How does that model work? And then you come into a rental market where you've got section twenty four tax, you know, where you're being taxed on income, not profit, and you're not getting the wear and tear allowances. You're not able to do all the sort of, you know, you've had legislation came in where you were. It was more tax efficient to run a holiday lap than to provide housing, which is why, I mean, what what government on the planet thinks the right idea for taxing property is to benefit luxury hospitality, housing over citizens having a roof over their head. I mean, it doesn't make any sense. And you and, you know, you touched on it earlier, the revolving door of housing ministers that we've had. I mean, Jesus Christ, we seem to be trying to challenge that record with our revolving door of prime ministers at the moment as well. But yeah, it's I don't know. I always find with government. The one thing I find bewildering about government is you hear and see these fantastic things that governments achieve in isolated cases around the world. And I always find it bewildering and bizarre that as governments, we don't kind of go, oh, that's oh, that's really fucking clever. How. Right. We don't have the same landscape as that. But you know, that solved that problem over there. How do could we do something similar? The trouble is, most people are scared to put their head above the parapet. I mean, you know, I do think you mentioned earlier what can you do about tax? To me, the simplest way is to I can't which scan it might be I can't scan. I think one of the Scandi countries does a twenty percent flat rate tax. Uh I'm not sure. And I think, you know, if you just said everything's taxed twenty percent. Yeah. Everyone just pay it. The good news is, and I don't mean immediately, but also in business, I think the simplification of the tax simplification, most of the accountants don't give the loopholes. The solicitors would be out of business because they just they wouldn't have the the unbelievably complicated crap you have to go through and you lose all of those costs within your business and everyone would pay it. And you know exactly what, everyone would pay it. And I'm sure government receipts would go through the roof. I mean, Burnham says, oh, I want to do I want to simplify things. Twenty percent flat rate, tax rate. That's the way forward. Yeah, yeah. Um, look, I really appreciate the chance to talk. We've been talking for forty five minutes. Seems like we've been talking all day and I could easily carry on all night, but I really appreciate the opportunity to, to put some of these things forward for discussion. And I know that you will present them in a way which is not sensationalist. You know, you're someone who I listen to when you talk. I it's just that it's, it's, it's really healthy to discuss and debate. And they and some of these things are really fucking complicated. You can't just fix them with a quick fix. There isn't you know, I think there are certain big moves like you've just touched on a simplification of tax makes it, you know, very, very simple, this bizarre imbalance. But like I said, between his hospitality and housing, although that is much more aligned now. But you know this. You know the bizarreness between the fact that you can own a property as a limited company and pay tax on profit. But if you're if you have it in your own name, you get taxed on income. Why? Yeah. Why is a company benefited over a private individual? It doesn't make any sense. And it's so complicated. The only benefit the only people who benefit are tax lawyers and accountants. And in a country where we worry about the future of pensions, particularly government pensions, why the fuck do we want to move away from something that gives a huge, well, a decent chunk of our population security? Yeah. In later life, you know, a lot of people because there's no long termism. Yeah. The problem is you get you get a five year cycle and people won't go look beyond that, you know? So no one says this is going to take ten years to replace. But we can't do it because in three, three years time, we're going to start canvassing for the next election. So you never get any long termism. It's why businesses, it's why countries like China are successful because they can just they, you know, I say successful. They're successful in certain areas because they can just take a long term view. They don't know when it's going to vote them out. Something I think is really interesting. It's not something I've seen taken off yet, but I think with this younger, as we've touched on, very tech agnostic generation, and particularly with AI and coding and everything you can do easily now. You know, I wonder if the future is less about us waiting for government to solve these problems and more kind of community interest businesses or not for profit or, you know, however you frame it. But you know what? We're going to build a business that solves this problem and that's its primary objective. And hopefully it's commercially viable enough to facilitate that. Government allows that to happen and doesn't tax it. Yeah. Well, listen, thanks a lot. Pleasure. Enjoy the bike ride back. I will I will see you soon. I have got other things to do in London, so I'd love to pretend I only came up from Dorset, But it's a good um riding motorbike as well, like fishing, which I also love because it's one of those things that when you're doing it, you have to do it. Yeah. You have to concentrate on it. If you don't, you're dying. Yeah. I rode a bike for a while and then very quickly ended. I've still got the scar for it. So, uh, yeah, I'm far too distracted to be here. I did, I did do a piece outside, and I'll do a couple of pictures of us together, because I do wonder whether I will get any tickets. Driving across London at twenty miles an hour and a motorbike is almost impossible. How? Anybody who's reading this lives or watching this lives in London and gets around on a motorbike or in a car, how do you do it? I've got a GS twelve hundred BMW and I'm literally carrying around, constantly pinging me. It's constantly pinging. I've got one of these Hyundai things with all the gadgets. Yeah, it is constantly like you're speeding, you're speeding, I'm barely moving. You can't turn them off. No, I know. Anyway, guys, thanks very much. Thank you. And thank you for joining us, guys. And, uh. Yeah, see you soon. Bye.