esco will have the reach as well as be able to sell a house for just £1000 - something to compete with eh! It’s not all doom and gloom though, like i said the smart agents will get their marketing right and focus on new ideas for value adding services and increasing levels of service in general. As a specialist estate agency marketing consultant i see these issues every day and it baffles me how many agents just d nothing… maybe thay have just had it too good for the past couple of years!

Cheers, Philip.

(MD, OnOneMap Limited)

Indeed. It would also provide true information on the state of the market (by observing how the gap changes over time.

As for Freakonomics… yes; I really enjoyed it. Have you read Tim Harford’s “The Undercover Economist”?

On a slight tangent, if you haven’t read Freakonomics yet, you should - there’s a good discussion there about house prices in the US - what agents’ own homes go for, versus the homes they sell on behalf of clients. I’m sure there must be a similar pattern in most other countries.

Netlettings (http://www.net-lettings.co.uk/index.htm) do something kind of like that for lettings but it’s still very coarse-grained.

I think such a tool would be very useful and I don’t see why it couldn’t be produced.

A market gap I’ve long thought about is the mapping of Land Registry sales information (which contains accurate prices and postcodes) with the estate agent listings from several months previous (which contain the asking prices, usually accurate postcodes and, crucially, information on the number of beds, etc). There’s definitely an opportunity for someone to figure out a way to correlate a particular sale with a particular for-sale listing and hence produce precisely the information you desire.

What I was hoping for to illustrate this discussion was more of a ‘weather map’ of house prices - based on the prices of all houses sold in the last few years (information that’s in the public domain), one could colour a map with ‘cold regions’ (blue) for low prices and ‘hot regions’ (red) for high ones. My guess, then, based on what you said, is that we’d see a red stripe alongside the river, with bluer areas to the north and south. Sadly, I’ve never seen such a map.

You can type in a postcode and it will then plot all the flats on sale in that postcode on a google map. You can zoom in (and may need to in order to see individual properties) and follow links to the sales particulars.

It doesn’t cover all agents but gives a good idea of the kinds of prices things fetch (although the current properties on sale at Free Trade Wharf are somewhat bigger - and hence more expensive - than the one I just bought )

As for the Isle of Dogs. It’s an interesting place: before the LDDC came along and was an isolated, poverty-stricken place. The arrival of Canary Wharf, the massively improved transport links and the property developments of the last 20 years have, of course, made a big difference but there is still a lot of council housing there and you don’t have to look far to find pockets of poverty. Indeed, it’s jarring to realise that 500 metres or so north of Canary Wharf is Poplar - which I understand to be one of the most deprived areas in Europe.

There is effectively an affluent ribon that snakes around the island, along the river (continuing west through Limehouse and Wapping), with less affluent areas more inland and to the north.

However, I suspect Asda draws customers from a wide range of backgrounds. Were it not for the fact that we don’t run a car, I suspect I would shop there more often: it is considerably cheaper than Waitrose (no surprise) and so it makes perfect sense to shop there for many items.

What did surprise me when I went for the first time, however, was that its fruit and veg section wasn’t too bad. Asda is normally notorious for its shoddy fresh section - but, for whatever reason, the Isle of Dogs branch is OK.

As for Asda knowing what they’re doing… you’re spot on. They carry a mind-bogglingly large range of ingredients for various styles of Asian cooking and sell bottles of vegetable oil larger than I’ve seen at some restaurants… they certainly stock according to local demand - as they should.

Unfortunately, I guess it’s probably not straightforward to obtain either the costs or the benefits of the leaflets you mentioned, as government doesn’t like to encourage accountability (as events in the last few days have shown). Tesco have the accountability part sorted - do profits go up or down? What I hope my anecdote illustrated was that the littlest things can have an effect on the bottom line. The timeliness of the message (i.e. it’s there when you’re actually deciding which food to buy) is what I felt was key here, and made me feel good about Tesco. In other words, they can be ‘nice’ and make a bigger profit at the same time - something evil-Western-capitalist-hater types often miss.

Anyway, enough libertarian frothing at the mouth: the reason I’m avoiding Sainsbury’s (the one in Winchester town centre, not Badger Farm) is because it’s useless. The place went through a revamp a few months back, but you wouldn’t know it - the staff are unprofessional, the shelves messy, items incorrectly priced - and for some reason they insist on stocking TVs and other junk that wastes valuable shelf space in a small store (for some reason they’ve decided not to brand it a Sainsbury’s Local, although it’s of that size). I don’t have a problem with most other Sainsburys’, so I can but assume it’s down to the local management. I shop there because it’s convienient, but I’d switch at the drop of a hat if there was a better alternative (I don’t drive so my options are limited).

I’m surprised there’s an Asda on the Isle of Dogs - I thought it was quite an upmarket area? There are sometimes strange local trends, though - I’m willing to bet Asda know what they’re doing.

I’d love to see all the “healthy eating” leaflets the government has published at great expense over the last few years and then compare their impact with the impact of simple measures like the one you spotted from Tesco.

What are the other reasons you’ll be avoiding Sainsbury’s? We don’t have one near us (only a Tesco Metro in Canary Wharf, an Asda on the Isle of Dogs and two Waitroses - in Canary Wharf and Wapping) but I’ve always quite liked Sainsbury’s - the Badger Farm and Hedge End ones in SOxx were always my preferred supermarkets when I lived down there.