Agents know buyers are out there, watching from behind computer screens. Ron Kennor of Robinson Jackson has advice for them.

We’ve been in a quieter property market since September of last year when the US credit crunch began and Northern Rock faltered. The resulting lower levels of business have forced many estate agents to lay off staff and trade in their BMWs for Ford Fiestas. All of us are now feeling the pinch and a few agents have closed their doors unable to make a living from the reduced turnover of homes being sold.

We all get a big kick, as well as a fee, from helping families move home, and this satisfaction is what motivates estate agency staff as much as their commission on the deal. Most estate agency sales staff are paid on a commission basis and customers and sales for them are now more precious than ever so you can expect the red carpet treatment if you visit your estate agent, but now surprisingly few do even in busy times.

The internet casts a very wide net scooping up thousands of enquiries which show up on our computer data as ‘hits’ to our websites in astronomic numbers. So we can see people are looking even if they not visiting us or registering their interest on traditional ‘mailing lists’.

These casual and anonymous browsers are perhaps the only solid evidence that the public are still very much interested in buying but perhaps reluctant to take the plunge until everyone else does – at which point of course prices again start to rise so the canny buyer should consider buying now when others aren’t brave enough.

Trawling through the papers it’s difficult to find any good news to encourage people to trade up or buy their first home as the media and the economists have always stated that our house prices are too high.

Perhaps they are but, despite nine months of press hysteria and some panic from the mortgage lenders, there has been no collapse in house prices, merely statistical percentage drops amounting only to a fraction of the rises we have seen in the last few decades.

In the long term a drop in prices will not cure the shortage of homes for sale and if it discourages residential development (hard enough in the best of times) it will aggravate the shortage of homes for the upcoming generations who may have to live with Mum and Dad for much longer than they expected.

My advice this week: Sell the thirsty 4x4 now while you still can and use the money as a deposit on a ‘buy-to-let’ home, currently yielding record rents, so your children may have a chance of their own home and you can enjoy a retirement without them on your sofa.

Ron Kennor is general manager of Robinson Jackson Estate Agencies. He can be contacted on 020 8316 6200.