Will the UK Housing Market ever be the Same Again?

Yes, it is true: this is not the first housing depression we have endured in the UK. It probably won't be the last either. One thing -- and I'm not saying the only thing -- that is different about this crisis however: it is the first UK house price crash of the internet age.

During the last house price crash, my parents would have fitted into the category of desperate vendors. We had moved from a rural area of Scotland to Hull, and the area we had moved to started to go downhill to drugs and gangs rapidly. My parents wanted a better life for us; a move back to the rural area we had moved from in the first place -- and fast.

They had to follow the estate agents advice, and continually drop the asking price if they wanted to sell; they had no other option. Today that is not the case.

Many of the so-called desperate vendors are looking online and finding that they no longer need to blindly follow the advice of their estate agent; there are other avenues of sale that attract wider exposure, and other options to selling at all in a downward market.

They are looking into avenues of selling privately online, or even swapping their home with people in a similar situation.

They are finding a veritable banquet of sites that allow them to advertise their property privately, most of which promise exposure to a far wider audience than an estate agent's window.

Take Zungalow.com for example, it allows people to sell their house privately, or swap, or do whatever they want really. Zungalow.com is basically a community where people can post their property, whether they are committed to moving or not. A good-homes-show community where you can showcase your home and see how many people want to buy it and how much they would be willing to pay.

This type of site threatens to revolutionise the selling of houses in the UK, and the downturn is causing a massive increase in the number of people using them. If people can sell on these sites, or swap their homes, and avoid the sharp price drops otherwise necessary, will the UK housing market ever be the same? Probably not, but what kind of changes can we expect?

Firstly, these other avenues may prolong the amount of time it takes for us to find the bottom this time, because the bottom will not be found until a large portion of a much larger volume of traditional vendors realised that the price drops are now a reality and drop their price to sell. But after this downturn, and the volumes of people that look at the new and varied other avenues, the property market is likely to be a very different place altogether.

With a wider use of private sales avenues, there will be more variety for the consumer. People will be trolling the internet for suitable homes, and will have estate agent's properties and privately sold properties to choose from. A wider variety will give better scope for bargains.

The increased volume of private sales should stop the unscrupulous agent's from unnecessarily inflating prices, which should stop future corrections, if there are any, from being anywhere as near as drastic as this one. And also, in the event of any future corrections, by giving seller's a wider and easier to find audience, the wider use of the new avenues should lessen the impact of the corrections, and shorten the length of any downturns.

Disclaimer (before Lee Bramzell writes to me): I have not said that estate agents are unscrupulous. I have merely mentioned unscrupulous estate agents. As with any industry there are professionals who act ethically and professionally, but there are also those who are not professional, and who do not act ethically. In an industry as unregulated estate agencies, it is inevitable that there will be good estate agents, bad estate agents and unscrupulous estate agents.