David Lawrenson has kindly agreed to answer a few questions we thought would be interesting to our readers at Gartoo.

Just as a bit of background about David, he is an independent property investment and lettings expert, helping companies and private landlord and investors. You can find out more on the Letting Focus website, blog or buy his book.

Do you think that the industry (landlords, tenants, estate agents, portals etc) have a good understanding of how powerful the internet is when promoting their property?

Yes they do these days and this has changed substantially within the last 5 to 10 years.

However, I still don’t think that a lot of landlords have cottoned on to the fact that they can advertise directly on the main portals for around £60 with the on line letting agents, thus cutting out the high street agents.

They can then do all the rest of the stuff – viewings, tenancy checks themselves.

In another 5 years time I think the amount of high street floor space owned by letting agents and estate agents will be less than half what it is today

Do you think the internet has now become the most popular first port-of-call for research when looking to buy/rent a property?

Yes, definitely

How has internet usage become a major part of your job role?

Cannot live without it. Anyone with a site also has to really understand internet marketing and SEO.

Are you particularly impressed by any online application about property?

Rightmove and the like are pretty slick. It is also good to be able see past selling prices. A while ago I really liked the UpMyStreet capability to track past house selling prices by property type and area as a graph. For some reason they stopped doing it as a graphical output – weird. Can someone do that again please?

How are you promoting your book online?

Oh yes, with publishers like mine who let’s say aren’t so great at getting it in the high street, I have to be pretty focused on driving on line sales myself.

Even though my book is only available in about one third of Waterstones and is never stocked by WH Smiths or anywhere else on most high streets for that matter, it is still, nevertheless the top selling UK property book and has been so for 3 years. It’s quite laughable really and in a small way explains why Amazon is gobbling up the market – i.e. high street booksellers are often a bit sleepy while Amazon and Play.com are clued up and always have books that sell in stock.

Do you foresee any major challenges for innovative property search engine like Gartoo UK, which uses semantic search to allow users to find properties online?

Oo, that all sounds complex but anything that helps speed up the process is good news.

About as close to Norway as it is to mainland Scotland, Skaw Cottage on the island of Unst has long been recognised as the most northerly house in the UK. As a result, Amazon thinks this is a good enough reason for us to want to pay £4.99 for a 10×8 photograph of it!

Image credit: Flickr

The picture itself is no more interesting to look at than the little factoid that goes with it. There’s the same undulating scrubland as in every other photo of the Shetlands, a one-way road with a few cottages at the end of it, and a strip of North Sea in the background. It’s quite pretty, although dare we say, not the most immediately eye-grabbing scene ever.

Home owners in the area can look forward to a Winter during which there may be no more than 5 hours of day light a day. The weather is known to change at the drop of a hat, though you are guaranteed at least some rain on 285 days out of each year.

However, we have been saving the best piece of Skaw trivia until last: it’s no longer the most northerly house in Britain. When the RAF closed the Saxa Vord radar station (Britain’s most northerly, of course) in 2006, work quickly began on converting the remaining buildings into the “Saxa Vord Resort”. As of April 2007 visitors can stay in any one of its 20 “self-catering holiday homes“. A close comparison of the co-ordinates places Saxa Vord a good 5.62 latitudinal seconds or two hundred metres further North, robbing Skaw of its centuries-old title and making it “almost the most northerly house in Britain”.

OK, if you’re being picky Saxa Vord is not a year-round residential house, but it’s certainly the most northerly sheltered place in Britain. Also, being perhaps a little fairer on Skaw, where else in the UK are you as likely to be able to watch the Northern Lights from your front window? A brief online property search on Gartoo for property in Unst find very reasonably priced some four-bedroom houses, surrounded by a few acres of land. Some going for “offers over £205,000”. Moreover, whilst admitting that the locals may be “a little more reserved than you’re used to”, Shetland.org notes that “the thing that people value most of all is the strength and warmth of the community.” With the competition over who’s the most northerly out of the way, and after viewing a few more photos like the one above, the Shetland isles might begin to sound rather lovely, really.