Property website cuts staff as sales slump

THE crisis facing estate agents deepened today when the country's leading property website axed more than a fifth of its workforce.

Rightmove, which has about 90 per cent of homes for sale in the UK advertised on its website, blamed the cuts more than 60 jobs on tumbling sales and plummeting house prices.

Drastic job cuts have already taken place at High Street estate agents as the industry faces its worst crisis for more than 30 years. Chris Brown, president of the National Association of Estate Agents, said: "The optimism and upbeat nature of most estate agents has been kicked out of them,"

Rightmove today said it was slashing its workforce in the face of "a challenging housing market". It added: "These are the first redundancies that the company has made as a result of the downturn in the UK housing market. The scale reflects the company's view that the current challenges will continue through 2009."

Rightmove has more than one million properties to buy or rent on its website worth more than £270 billion. At the top of the housing boom, it would receive more than 35 million visits a month but business has collapsed over fears of a looming recession. Estate agents are selling just one or two houses a week as buyers struggle to get mortgages or wait for prices to fall further.

David Miles, an economist at Imperial College London, said: "There is a stand-off between people who have got a house to sell and people who have got mortgage credit, and they cannot agree on a price."