Article: Time to weed out the cowboys in the estate agents' world

THERE'S a surprising lack of consensus among the experts, from rent-a-quote pundits to globally recognised economists, as to the gravity of the economy's woes.

But if a real financial crisis has one virtue, it's that it has a useful habit of separating the wheat from the chaff in the financial services world.

In the past two weeks alone, seven mortgage brokers have been banned by the Financial Services Authority (FSA). In most cases they have been guilty of mortgage fraud - or more specifically, submitting false mortgage applications.

They've only been banned from regulated business, however, so some may engineer a career change and become estate agents.

It's astonishing that, while ...

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