The Wet Web
Helen Gazeley discovers the estate agent who yearns for her own canalside home.
HAVE you ever dreamed of a place by the water, rather than living on the water? The pleasure of a mains-fed toilet, but with the narrowboat at the bottom of the garden?
It’s something that Sheridan Parsons, who last month launched specialist estate agency Canalside Homes, fully understands. “It’s my dream to have a canalside home,” she says.
Setting up a business in the middle of a pandemic has been challenging, not least because it wasn’t possible to meet friends and family who could have acted as a sounding board for her ideas, while her husband was “endlessly glued to his screen with Teams meetings.”
Instead, she’s found enormous support through the Facebook group she set up in 2018 ( www. facebook.com/ groups/ canalsidehomes), dedicated to publicising canalside property. “I really appreciate social media, getting feedback on my ideas. It’s really useful to voice what you’re planning.”
Sheridan now has her own website (canalsidehomes.uk), listing the properties on her books, but the Facebook group, with membership open to all, will continue listing properties with other agents. “It’s the loveliest group on Facebook. We all help each other. I can’t spot every property but other members add something, and then someone comments, giving information on the location. It’s very useful to people who are buying property.”
Sheridan has learned a lot too. “In October 2018, when I started out, I knew about property but it’s become more intense – particularly understanding river properties. I can tell fairly easily when there are flooding issues with certain canals, for example.” This year has been an intense learning curve, with regulations on money laundering and data protection to digest, the right software to choose, branding to develop, and the Property Redress Scheme to join.
Canalside Homes even has a bank of artists to work on brochures and offer property ‘portraits’ and offers a research option, uncovering a property’s history, something Sheridan did when working as a genealogist. “I’ve never seen another agent offer it. It’s a real bit of enjoyment for the client.”
Some of her research will end up in tales of property on her website blog. “There’s all sorts – transshipment warehouses, chapels, lock keepers’ cottages. And all the modern developments as well – it might be a brownfield site. The history is all about people and you can find out who actually lived there.”
While setting up an independent estate agency sounds unusual these days, Sheridan says things are changing a lot. “It started a couple of years ago,” she added, “a rebellion against big corporate agencies. It’s daunting. Because of the way corporates train people – to be expert in isolated parts like negotiation or the back office – youngsters coming up find it very difficult to do all the jobs. When I was trained, there was much more collaboration between different areas.”
Something else that has changed since Sheridan’s early estate agency days, and with speed during the past year, is the arrival of live-streamed viewings. “The agent’s in the house, holding an iPad or phone, and they’ll have pre-booked viewers and answer questions live. They’re here to stay – it’s a much easier way for people to get first viewings, much easier for vendors.”
The burning question for many of us, though, is whether the dream of a waterside property, with mooring, is really possible. Can one find anything at a low price? Yes. And no. “There’s a reason why it’s low,” she says. A two-bedroom detached house in Stoke-on-Trent, described as ‘with mooring’ by the agent and priced at £150,000, turned out to be the last property on the water before the A53 and, to Sheridan, looked unlikely to have any sort of useful mooring. “You’d have to check,” she says.
When you know exactly what you want, it’s good to find someone who has an expert eye on what’s actually on offer.