Tis the season for those fortunate companies with pricing power to up their tariffs and charges. And for those without it to gulp bravely and start scouting around for cost savings instead, in what promises to be a tough 2008.

Companies with monopoly positions or sticky customers are finding it relatively easy to push up prices. The M6 motorway toll was lifted by 12.5 per cent to £4.50 on January 1. Rail fares on unregulated journeys went up by as much as 10 per cent. Energy bills are rising by 15-20 per cent, as npower’s six million gas and electricity customers will discover today. Private school bursars continue to lift fees with relative ease.

Companies operating in more competitive arenas such as electrical gadgets or clothing have none of that luxury, as DSG, the former Dixons, and Next showed in gloomy reports yesterday. Competition from supermarkets and online rivals is driving down laptop and plasma TV prices. Next has managed to maintain prices but at the expense of underlying sales volumes.

Estate agents too are about to discover their fees falling for the first time in 15 years. Thanks to fixed commissions of 1.5 per cent or so on the purchase price, their revenues have risen effortlessly on the rising tide of house prices. But residential property prices are likely to plateau at best this year, while the volume of transactions – the most important determinant of revenues – is sliding. Mortgages are being rationed for the first time in years, the Bank of England said yesterday, which is likely to exacerbate the reversal.

An unloved industry renowned for describing the pokiest cupboard as “deceptively spacious” may find itself ruefully applying that description to its own shrinking marketplace. Agents that expanded most aggressively in the good times are likely to suffer most. Small independents, well entrenched in their local communities, will better withstand the chill.

So far confidence remains quite high, according to the National Association of Estate Agents. But other larger chains with the flexibility are likely to follow Your Move’s cull, even if things get no worse.

If the experience of the early 1990s is repeated, the cutbacks could be speedy and brutal. Then whole chains were closed or drastically pared back overnight. For an industry now employing 50,000 people or more, that would spell jobs pain, and many more boarded up shop fronts on the high street.

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