Agents must work with (not against) those wanting regulation - call

A prominent PropTech entrepreneur is urging agents and other in the property industry to engage with those wishing to introduce regulation - and possibly to persuade them that internal regulation may work better.

Neil Cobbold, of automated payment service PayProp, says in a video interviewer with Letting Agent Today that any independent regulator such as currently proposed by some politicians and trade bodies, will need guidance from within the industry.

“A regulator is not the be all and end all, it’s not the silver bullet, it won’t turn around an industry” he tells Angels Media interviewer Lee Dahill.

Nor does Cobbold believe that even a respected regulator - he cites communications watchdog Ofcom and the Financial Conduct Authority as examples -  can avoid being, in his words, “strained” by the workload necessary to keep up with the demands of its respective industry.

But he suggests that the more effort put in now, at an early stage, the better the result will be for the industry when politicians eventually decide how to regulate the agency business.

“The best people to steer that and to make sure it’s right for the industry, is the industry itself” he says.

Cobbold also covers future use of technology within the agency industry in the rest of the video interview, which you can see below.