Tried and tested estate agency can’t be beaten
Every week, there seems to be a new challenger and self proclaimed “disruptor” having a pop at the estate agency sector, bringing their new sparkling product to the market amid claims to be the answer we have all been looking for.
It may be a new property search portal with greater in-depth analysis, digital online estate agency or some money-saving offering that we apparently can’t live without.
Yet these new kids on the block seem to fail with alarming regularity, so why?
They frequently argue that one doesn’t need property specific experience to sell a home. You just need a sales background, their computer algorithm or they offer a cheap fee.
Experience in the property sector counts for nothing in their eyes and so my last 20 years in the sector may have counted for nothing?
Yet these types of businesses miss what property is about and that is people and emotions.
To really understand all these idiosyncratic nuances, overcome highly stressful situations involving significant amounts of money, while getting the very best out of people all at the same time, there is no substitute for hard earned time at the agency coal face.
This will mean you can often resolve issues before they even become a problem, as you have the expertise, foresight and skills to do this.
As I have always said, getting to Under Offer is the easy bit. Under Offer to Exchange of Contracts is the really hard part.
I feel property is one of the most bizarre and specialist business sectors the UK has to offer and I can understand why those without the industry experience, feel that they can shake things up with a new offering.
However, what they forget is that property doesn’t work off human or computer logic and straight line thinking. Emotions and stress throw all of that out the window.
Property is all about the unaccounted for, the left-field options and the irrational choices. You can’t ask a computer to overlay some new-fangled algorithm to account for human emotion.
Countrywide was one of the UK’s largest estate agency groups and appointed Alison Platt as its CEO in 2014. What followed was a well-documented disaster bringing the company to its knees.
Experienced agency board members were replaced by those with retail backgrounds. The focus changed from a people business to a retail one. The results were dramatic, the share price dropped and the company was then purchased by the Connells Group.
One can then take notes from arguably the most high profile digital estate agency in the form of Purplebricks. When they launched, they got many in the industry to sit up and pay attention.
As a result, established agents upped their game, which was no bad thing.
However since then, the Purplebricks offering has lost market share in the last few years, where traditional agencies gained ground.
Property specific experience is evidently key to a businesses success and to prove it some of the longest established estate agents in the country can date their roots back to the 1800s while evolving with the times.
So if you are an estate agent focussed on being cheap, my question is “Is this really in your clients’ best interests?”. I’ll let you, the reader, be the judge.