What potential does 2008 hold for licensees?

What potential does 2008 hold for licensees? That's the question we at Fleurets asked visitors to fleurets.com during the last two months.

"With so much of the talk in the industry surrounding the 'credit crunch' and fears over the economy, we thought we'd ask licensees what potential they saw in the trade for 2008 and the results were very interesting," said Simon Hall, director at Fleurets.

The majority of those who completed the questionnaire (44%) said that Dry Trade presented them with the biggest potential for growth in 2008, with 29% highlighting Letting Rooms, 23% saying the Wet Trade and just 4% saying Vending.

Simon added: "So what do we know about visitors to our website and these results? Well, generally speaking, they are looking to instruct us to sell their property or they are browsing through some of the circa 850 licensed properties we have on the market. Does this skew the findings? Perhaps. That said, we are involved with such a cross section of the licensed trade, the website user is likely to be a mix of successful licensee looking to add to their estate; pubco official; private vendor and those taking a look at the trade for the first time."

Simon finished by saying: "Crucially, we are looking to continually run similar polls on our website and in some cases we'll repeat the questions to judge the temperature of the water as the year moves on."