We’re here! Property Industry Eye launched this week as a daily news service for the estate and letting agent industry. We have been overwhelmed by your comments and are very grateful for your support. Please continue to spread the word!

At its helm is myself, Rosalind Renshaw, as editor, with Nick Salmon as managing director and John Brassington our third director. You can read more in the ‘about us’ section.

Our aims are simple: to provide a genuinely independent and authoritative news service for agents. Editorial is totally independent of advertising and will always remain so.

We also plan to run an uncluttered site, which means keeping the volume of advertising down and not allowing flashing banner adverts.

We have built the site very quickly because we sensed an urgent need in the market to provide this type of impartial and trustworthy industry news. Some people may find it a bit too plain, but we have concentrated on making it functional and easy to use.

Improvements will follow and these will ideally be ones that readers suggest.

You can visit the site daily or, better still, simply sign up and have the news delivered each morning to your own inbox. It is completely free and will remain so.

One important house rule is that we will only allow readers to comment on stories if they are signed up. This allows us to check that comments are from recognised, legitimate email addresses, although readers are able to choose their own user names.

We hope you will welcome this house rule, as it is intended to put a stop to just anyone posting a comment, using a false (or even no) email address, and perhaps even passing themselves off as someone else.

As a new site, there are bound to be some IT glitches for which I apologise in advance.

I also know that as editor I am not going to get everything right, and I am perfectly happy for readers to correct me and put their own points of view.

Finally, I should say that this is a pro-agent news service: after all, why write about an industry if you don’t like it? We believe that the vast majority of agents are hard-working and honest, and have an ethical business model.

However, we will be exposing bad practice and rogues, and also reporting on challenges that the industry faces, whether these are legal or come from one of the several new online ventures in the offing. Please do not think that when we mention an online venture, we are expressing any opinion: we leave opinions to our readers. We are merely the messenger, not a promotions service.

Do get in touch with your news and views. My email address and phone number are in the ‘contact us’ section and I very much look forward to being in touch with you.