I was reading the Gumtree Board when I came across this cry for help:

“I’ve been very happily recruiting lodgers from Gumtree’s short term section for nearly 4 years now, it’s worked really well for me and I’ve had lots of interesting and well-behaved tenants. But I’ve been advertising for 3 weeks now – not one response and only 28 views of my ad? Have the scammers driven the genuine flatseekers away?”

This rang a bell with me as we stopped using Gumtree a year ago after a series of abortive listings with no serious enquiries, and atrocious customer service over paid for listings which weren’t run. There is a market in London for advertising from private landlords who don’t want to incur a letting agent’s fees, and it is interesting and informative to review the changes to this market over the last few decades.

London Evening Standard

If you go back further than I can remember (and that’s quite a long way!) the only place to advertise a flat in London was in The London Evening Standard, which in those days was one of 2 evening papers published daily, and carried extensive Classifieds. Nobody looking to rent a London Flat looked anywhere else, and no Landlord advertised anywhere else.

Loot

The market was turned on it’s head in 1985 by Loot’s founder, David Landau, with the launch of a revolutionary new paper called “Loot” – a means ‘to buy, sell or exchange absolutely anything’ – and it turned the Classifieds industry on it’s head. It was  published every Thursday containing only 16 pages of ads, but uniquely instead of charging the advertiser it charged £1 for the paper. Although that was an extraordinarily high charge for a list of  classified ads people flocked to buy the paper as the free to list business model ensured that it would contain wonderful bargains. It became an outstanding success, and took over as the medium for London’s Landlords and Tenants. Nearly twenty years on I can remember my very first listing in Loot – it was viewed and let at 07:30 on the Thursday morning and the rest of my day was spent explaining to callers that the flat had been let.  At one point, Loot’s free-ads publication was published in 20 editions per week across the UK with a weekly circulation of approximately 180,000 copies and it held a monopoly in the field of private flat renting.

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Scoot buys Loot

The decline of Loot started in 2000 when it left private ownership and was sold to Scoot for £200M before passing into the hands of the owners of the Daily Mail. The simple problem was that having paid so much money the new owners needed to get a much higher return from the business than it’s private owners had been happy with. When Loot started charging Landlords for their advertisements, they moved on and soon the tenants stopped looking. I can confirm from 2 expensive advertising campaigns in Loot that it is no longer somewhere for landlords to consider advertising.

Gumtree

Gumtree was a struggling free Classifieds Website founded in 2000 by former bankers Michael Pennington and Simon Crookall, however when Loot’s need for higher margins result in commercial suicide, the website was able to step into the breach. During the period 2002 – 2007 Gumtree replaced Loot as the dominant location for flathunters, and for those 5 years Pimlico Flats didn’t advertise anywhere else. However in a story reminiscent of the Loot story, in 2005 eBay purchased Gumtree, policies changed to try to extract a return from the investment, and within 2 years the site was in the sharp decline reflected so aptly on their community discussion board. Just has Loot managed to destroy it’s own business by pricing out the bargains that brought paying viewers to it’s doorstep, Gumtree has become victim to a similar suicide. It has become a haven for scams of many different kinds (click on the Scam Tag in our Tag Cloud)  whilst simultaneously raising it’s charges to advertisers, and in consequence it’s listings have lost value to viewers.

London Flat to Rent?

Where should you advertise?

I’ll tell you that tomorrow!