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Board Wars: No End to the For Sale Signs in Sight

Laurence Glynne is diligent, energetic and entrepreneurial. He is also a caring father and a snappy dresser, in fact if you were to list the virtues that a thoroughly 1990s sort of small businessman ought to have, you will find there are remarkably few that Laurence Glynne does not have in abundance.

He is the perfect service-sector executive – except that he is an estate agent. Because he is so diligent, energetic and so on, you have probably seen his company’s “For Sale” boards dotted around the West End and central London.

Glynne is a man who feels that the law has treated him unjustly. He is one of a small band of agents who have been hauled up in front of a magistrates’ court and fined for displaying boards in places where the Town and Country Planning Act 1987 (Control of Advertisement Regulations) says they should not be.

In his case it was outside a flat in Bayswater. “I put up a sign and the next day I got a call from a rival estate agent pointing out that we needed permission from the planners because it was a conservation area”, he said.

“Within 48 hours the sign was down and I thought no more about it. Then weeks later I was visited by men from Westminster council who prosecuted me for illegal display of the board”.

It cost him £350 in fines and costs and, while he concedes that technically an offence was committed, he was irritated by what he sees as the inability of the council to distinguish between a genuine and quickly rectified mistake and deliberate flouting of the law.

We all feel like that when pinched for petty offences, but Glynne has more cause than most to complain; in almost any street in the land you can see the regulations ignored.

He said: “I can see the point of trying to stop the abuses but they continue on the same scale as before. I was one of the unlucky few who are rounded up occasionally”.

The idea behind the regulations was to remove the clutter of estate agents’ boards which continuously scars many street scenes – but the regulations have failed. They are in as big a mess as the streets they were intended to tidy up.

Except for periodic blitzes, local authorities in most areas have made few attempts at enforcement.

Glynne points to West Hampstead, in north London, as an area where the sign problem is evident. The picture on the right shows just one of the many apparent breaches of the rules – this example being in Mill Lane, where a flat above a shop sports boards from two rival agents, David George, manager of the local Cornerstone office said that there were no others on the site when he agreed to display his company’s “I’ll take our board down. My bosses will go loopy if we get fined, and I just don’t want the hassle”.

Doris Ishack, manager of Greene’s, an independent estate agent in nearby West End Lane, said: “It’s very difficult for us to drive round the 200 or so roads in our area to monitor other agent’s boards, but it is policy not to contravene the planning laws. That board will be down by tomorrow morning”.

The regulations ban “Sold” boards but agents get around the ban by saying “Sold, subject to contract”. As the regulations do not control type sizes, the word “Sold” is as big as ever, and you need a telescope to read the rest.

Anybody who has bought a house since 1988 knows very well that weeks and often months go by after the signing of the contract before that sold sign is taken down.

The regulations limit the number of boards to one per property, but fail to define properly what a property is. A building? Or each leased area inside a building?

In some neighbourhoods, boards have become a permanent fixture, often stationed outside the same houses for years on end. But what constitutes a board? Is it a single pole with single placard attached? If so, what about the growing practice of agents putting their sign on one side of a pole put up by a rival?

The maximum permitted size is 0.5square metres, roughly 2ft by 3ft. Yet the acres of empty office space can be advertised on boards many times that size, and in the present commercial property slump those signs often stay until the wood rots and they fall down.

From next month, estate agents are to face the threat of draconian penalties if they put up boards that are either oversize or in places that are not permitted. Under new regulations in the Property Misdescriptions Act, due to come into force in the next few weeks, agents found guilty of breaching the existing planning regulations by displaying boars that are more than 0.5 square metres or outside a property that already has another agent’s board are liable to be banned by the Office of Fair Trading.

The same fate awaits those who have the temerity to put up a board without permission from the planners anywhere inside three designated conservation areas – Bath, Kensington and Westminster. Lesser miscreants can be warned by the OFT. But it is unlikely to make much difference because these are what are known as “trigger offences”. Local authorities have to initiate action, and they are usually too busy to bother.

The rules are a complicated mine field which are made all the more confusing because they are so widely breached, says Simon Agace, director of Winkworths. But some authorities do act. In the first prosecutions brought against estate agents for displaying oversized signs in residential streets six firms were fined a total of £1,030 in June 1989, following a crackdown by Hammersmith and Fulham Council.