Rightmove cuts staff as vendors overvalue homes

Rightmove is cutting staff numbers by 20% and making 60 people redundant.

The property website, which advertises around 90% of homes for sale in the UK, has seen sales plummet and is now joining High Street estate agents in laying-off staff.

The company says that while these are the first redundancies it has made as a result of the downturn in the UK property market, the scale of the job losses are in line with the challenges it expects to face into 2009.

At the same time, the firm is scaling back its Rightmove Overseas business, given the fall in demand for property in continental Europe.

Also today, the president of the National Association of Estate Agents (NAEA), Chris Brown, warned that many UK sellers are overestimating the value of their properties.

According to Mr Brown, homeowners have not yet come to terms with the impact of the credit crisis on the housing market and are consistently overestimating how much their homes are worth.

Earlier this week, Global Insight predicted that UK homes could lose 35% of their value in a peak to trough fall that began late last summer and will bottom out in autumn of 2009.

The economic forecasting agency expects the nadir to be followed by 18 months of stagnation.