Last week I asked for your help. Could anyone, I said, suggest a bank that was capable of taking care of my current account with an adequate level of competence. Given my experiences with service-orientated industries in the UK over the last few years, I genuinely expected the answer to be ‘no’. Banking in the UK, I thought you would tell me, is a sad matter of choosing between the astonishingly incompetent and the mildly incompetent. I’m pleased to say I was completely wrong. The emails started coming in last Friday morning and they are still coming in now.
And the really extraordinary thing is that almost everyone who responded (after berating me for my stupidity in being with Lloyds TSB in the firsplace) recommended the same bank First Direct. Everyone seems to love them. Why? The answer, as one reader put it, is simple: ‘super bank, super people, super service’. So there you go. Apparently it is possible to run a reasonable bank with good customer service. The only remaining mystery is why everyone doesn¹t do it.
The other banks that came up more than once, in case you are interested, were Smile, Nationwide and two private banks, Adam & Co and Cater Allen, both of which came highly recommended. I¹m tempted by the idea of a private bank who isn’t and had been thinking about it. However, now I have been told about First Direct, I don’t think I can really justify the expense. First Direct it is.
Finally, a word on the property market (something I haven’t let myself mention for a few weeks). We are constantly told that there is no need to worry about house prices falling. But they are falling. The anecdotal evidence is all over the place. Take the case of television presenter Natasha Kaplinsky. She has become one of the first to admit losing money on London property, selling a house she bought in 2001 for £10,000 less than she paid for it.
However, the price falls are in the statistics too. In May, for example, house prices fell 0.6%, according to Halifax figures. Doesn’t sound like much does it? But as a sensible reader pointed out to me this week, annualise that 0.6% and that’s a fall of 7.2%, to which you must then add the negative effects of rising inflation. The upshot? In real terms, house prices are falling around 10% per annum based on May’s numbers. At the moment, the estate agents are getting away with covering this up, as they can still refer to annual numbers (ie, over the last 12 months) as being positive. However, not long now and even this number will have turned negative. Then what will the bulls say?