Estates Gazette to close after 166 years
The heart says this is the end of an era – the head says it is more akin to a retirement a long time in the making.
The Estates Gazette was once the flagship of the property marketing industry. At ad agencies, such as Gilbert Doyle, Thursday evenings and Fridays saw a flurry of activity, in the production department, as numerous colour page ads went off to the publication for placement the following week.
The front cover award was much coveted amongst surveying practices and the annual Award Ceremony a great business (but probably more social) event. One year, having won two on the bounce, Howard Woollaston, head of marketing at Knight Frank at the time, briefed most all of London’s property marketing agencies to come up with ideas for their next years cover ad. He admitted afterwards he didn’t quite have the nerve to go with the concept of a plain white ad with the line “Let Someone Else Win It This Year!” set in 16 point Helvetica at the foot of the page!
Whether it would have won, and in fact who actually won, that year, is not important. The point is these were times which were about to change dramatically on the marketing and advertising landscape.
It had once been the job of a grad trainee in every surveying practice to go through the Estates Gazette each week noting all the new instructions being advertised. The need for this disappears with properties being launched digitally direct to targets’ desktops or mobiles with details available online. New players coming into the marketplace, such as CoStar, based their business on the burgeoning digital marketing era, unfettered by what had been the practice before.
It is somewhat ironic that first news of the impending closure came from that very source.
EG, the UK real estate news and intelligence service formerly known as Estates Gazette, is to close.
The group’s parent company said it had taken the “tough decision” to start withdrawing all EG products and services from the market during 2025.
The group cited “the headwinds that have struck the whole of the commercial real estate industry”. The EG business, which was founded in 1858, includes the magazine, EG Radius data business and EG Propertylink listings.
Managing director Chris Fleetwood said: “EG has been such an integral part of the UK commercial property market for such a long time, so this decision has understandably been very hard. However, we are immensely proud of all that the business and its people have delivered over the many, many years, from being the property journal of choice to becoming the first contributory database for the UK property sector.”
He added: “The past few years have been very difficult for the real estate industry as a whole, and EG has been caught in these headwinds too. We have worked hard to fortify the business but have unfortunately had to make this extremely difficult decision.”