Estate Agency Academy

Apologies for once again writing about a challenger to the traditional estate agency service, but they’re coming out thick and fast at the moment and I think there are important lessons for us all to learn from these new approaches.

After months of speculation as to how they would do it, Spicer Haart have sort of unveiled their new estate agency service using the Tesco brand. iSold.com offers a fixed price estate agency service for £999 and is being launched in Bristol this weekend. A curious decision to launch it under a new brand name with the Tesco name merely being used in association, but probably more to do with branding rights than marketing strategy. However, unlike when Tesco launched Tesco Property Market, I think it is probably the right call to launch it in one area where marketing and PR efforts can be focused and delivery can be managed rather than nationally where they end up with a couple of instructions here and there. The Foxtons approach to new offices was always to divide and conquer one town at a time and I would expect iSold to adopt a similar strategy. The price is a likely to be a crowd puller and their tech is also going to be quite slick by the looks of things. I registered on the site this morning for updates and within moments, I received my fully personalised update…

Full Article

Why the likes of Zoopla are better instigators of change for the industry

So the OFT have decided that the industry doesn’t need further regulation. Some may feel that is a bad thing, but you only need to look across the road the financial services industry to see how toothless and ineffective regulators can be at keeping an industry in check.

The process of buying and selling a property in the UK has much potential for change and improvement, but surely it is better for that change to be embraced and developed by the industry, rather than imposed on it?

To provide an effective prescription, you need to have a good diagnosis. And the anatomy of the property industry is very poorly understood by those outside of it. That is why we have endured years of ‘consultation’ with Government, only for them to fudge it with HIPs.

While committees have been debating the nuances of first day marketing and formulating pages of tick boxes for purposes only known to them, others with a better understanding of property have been thinking long and hard about ways to do things better. Change for the better is usually achieved much more easily through innovation than regulation anyway.

One such innovation came good last week. 57 properties were sold last Sunday having been on the market for just 4 days… 4 days? 57 properties? Sunday??

Read the rest of the article here.

A few months ago, I questioned whether Tepilo; the self-sale portal being fronted by Channel 4 Property presenter; Sarah Beeny could have any impact on the UK property market. Having already seen a fair bit of anecdotal evidence that they were doing okay, I was still surprised to learn that Tepilo has listed 5,619 properties to date (they launched last summer) with apparently 50 to 100 new listings per week now coming on to the site. A small percentage of the total marketplace, but that’s still a lot of unneeded valuation packs by anyone’s standards. I remain unsure about how self sale can be profitable regardless of the number of listings, but for the purposes of this article, I would like to park all that. My interest today in them is more in their success in gaining instructions than their delivery of sales. If you must sate your appetite for FSBO bashing, look no further than Peter Rollings from Marsh and Parsons who made the case against the self sale route very eloquently in a recent blog post.

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