Article about Recipease closure in today's newspaper here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... e-day.html
I will make one observation on estate agents - sooner or later a lot of their income is going to migrate to the internet. If you say a house is worth £1.2m at 1.5% commission that is £18,000. The work that an estate agent does isn't worth anything like that amount. Ten years ago, estate agents added value because they were the ones with the lists of prospective buyers - they were real middlemen/women. Now, for the middle market, everyone sees property on the portals. Similarly, ten years ago, an estate agent was needed to put together a professional brochure for the property. Now, a lot of them outsource the photography, floorplans, design, etc. to third parties, that you can also use directly.
I'm not saying that estate agents will vanish, but I think that there will be a move to cheaper fee-based services in the middle of the market, with those estate agents that hang on being the ones that really add value.