The hard sell: how solicitors and estate agents are coping with the harsh new realities of the property market

Estate agent David Alexander looks back on the halcyon days of the property boom with fondness. "You could go out and put a for-sale sign up on a flat and by the time you got back to the office, someone would have lodged a note of interest," he remembers. "Things have certainly changed."

• One of the roadshows organised by the ESPC

Just a couple of years ago, property agents had it easy. With queues of would-be buyers lining up outside every home, clutching shiny mortgage promises and wearing a look of desperation, it was every inch a sellers' market.

If a vendor couldn't make a viewing, the agents hired the cheapest labour they could get their hands on – students – who pitched up, settled in on the floor of the living room with a well-thumbed copy of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and blithely ignored the eager househunters wandering about around them. The property still sold, usually within a few weeks.

Now, things have changed. Staff from the Edinburgh Solicitors' Property Centre (ESPC), an umbrella body representing solicitors responsible for around 90 per cent of sales in the capital, have this month ventured from their cosy George Street showroom for the first time to run a series of roadshows aimed at kick-starting the flagging property market.

Estate agents tell of working longer days, staying in the office late and holding viewings at weekends on the whim of a prospective buyer in an effort to hang on to those few precious inquiries which are made.

Seller Helen Croney admits she has dramatically changed her tactics since selling her previous property – a two-bedroom former council flat in Ladybank, Fife – three years ago. Croney, 30, has been marketing her current home, a three-bedroom detached house in nearby Windygates, since August, attracting just one viewer so far.

"When I sold my last flat, we had it on the market for less than 24 hours when a man knocked at the door and offered us 10,000 above the asking price," she recalls. "We hadn't done anything to the place. We'd just got a puppy and he had ripped up the stair carpet, there was a hole in the plaster in the wall we'd been meaning to get filled in but hadn't.

"This time, I spent a whole week doing the property up because we were told that unless everything was absolutely top-notch, we'd have no chance of selling. I repainted everything and cleared everything out. The estate agent has insisted on doing the viewings himself because he says it looks more professional to prospective buyers. It's a totally different ball game."

Individual sellers are being forced to accept offers well below their asking price, while the few developers still building homes are offering increasingly generous incentives in an effort to win buyers.

"People are just having to accept that the price they get for their property will be chipped away at," says Alexander, who runs his agency, DJ Alexander, from offices in Glasgow and Edinburgh. "People who have had an offer accepted are saying, 'I've had the survey done now and the boiler's quite old, so I'd like to take 1,000 off for that'

or, 'There's a small roof leak so I'd like another 1,000 off for that'. Whereas before sellers might take the attitude that if a sale wasn't completed quickly and without any hassle, they'd just move on to the next nearest offer, those other offers just aren't there now."

He recalls a one-bedroom flat on Edinburgh's Queen Street which was put on the market in January 2008 – and at a pricey 280,000, still attracted no fewer than 21 notes of interest.

"I think you'd struggle to even sell that at all now, never mind find a fight on your hands," he says. "The problem is, it's not that people aren't wanting to move – the usual reasons are still there. It's that there's no money available for lending and people just can't move.

First-time buyers bring liquidity to the market and free things up, but those first-time buyers are just not around at the moment."

Bank worker Louise McKay, who finally moved home in July after an agonising nine-month attempt to sell, found her target audience of young couples and first-time buyers were struggling to get on the housing ladder.

"We had our two-bedroom flat on the market from September 2009," says McKay, who, with her husband Jon, was looking for a larger property with a garden for their 21-month-old daughter, Laila. "A few times, we had offers, but then they fell through because often the buyers couldn't get a mortgage in place."

First-time buyers are being specifically targeted by the ESPC, with a series of special events set up for new would-be property owners alone.

"The majority of first-time buyers are funded by the Bank of Mum and Dad these days," says ESPC financial advisor Brian McCarthy. "We are not really finding that there are many young buyers who can get a deposit together themselves. A few years ago, 5 per cent deposits – or less – would be fine. In the current climate, people are struggling.

"We are getting a lot of parents wanting to know how they can remortgage their own homes to help their offspring with a deposit. We are giving them that kind of service now, looking at their situation and trying to work out ways they can fund their children."

ESPC sales adviser Claire Boulton adds: "We're having to be a bit more creative. People just need a bit of an extra helping hand now and we're having to respond to that."

Tony Perriam, head of residential sales for upmarket Edinburgh-based estate agent Rettie & Co, explains: "It's a buyers' market right now as we all know. Although we never lose sight that it is the sellers who are our clients, we do need to be much closer to our buyers than before."

Even at the top end of the market, where service has always been paramount, Perriam admits things have changed. "We, as agents, have to work harder to put properties out to the market," he says. "We have to be more aware of when a property is available for viewings and if that is convenient for buyers. Telling the story of the property is important and the media in which we tell that story is important.

"Previously, during the boom, it may not have been necessary to market the property as much as we do now, but now we have to think of having the best pictures and the best brochures. Campaigns will be longer and we have to employ the channels at our disposal to make the properties look their best. We may have been able to short-circuit this previously."

But, while the estate agents are going the extra mile, not all sellers have embraced this brave new world – as some buyers have found. "We made an evening appointment to view one flat and arrived to have the sellers tell us in a whisper that their children were asleep in the bedrooms and we could only peek into the rooms in the dark," says Paul Thompson, 31, a fundraising manager from Stockbridge, Edinburgh.

"They then told us that we needed to put in a bid by a deadline of the next morning if we wanted it – without having been able to look at two of the rooms. The following week, we were greeted at the door of another flat by a professional viewer, employed by the estate agency, who started the conversation with, 'Well, as you can see, it's very small. A bit poky, really.' Some people just don't seem to have a clue.

It's as if they don't realise it's a tough market – and aren't desperate to sell at all."

He adds: "It's not really surprising that both those properties are still on the market."