Search the Community

Walking by Frank Innes the other day (part of Countrywide plc),I saw they've begun offering a flat fee service,presumably to respond to Purplebricks and the like.Tellingly,they're actually cheaper,despite maintaining a much larger physical network of costly offices. I know some people who've used Purplebricks, and they stressed that they preferred managing their own bookings and taking their own calls etc due to the fact that they'd had previous experience of EA's not dealing diligently with enquiries. I remember fifteen years ago my local High st having 2/3 EA's ,now it's got 10 or so.I presume we'll get back to 2/3 after a long slow grind to the bottom.With the scrapping of tenants fees (which they'll struggle to load up on landlords) and the clear price war in the sales market,the future looks bleak for EA's. http://www.frankinnes.co.uk/sell-your-home/ 'Sell your home your way Manage your sale yourself with our Flexi-Service package for just £795, or choose our Full-Service option and let us do the hard work for you.' https://www.purplebricks.com/ 'Your own Local Expert from valuation to completion Instruct to sell for £849 / Landlords save £1,000’s Selling fee of £1,199 in London and surrounding areas' http://easy.com/images/pdfs/2016-10-21-on-line-estate-agents-continue-to-gain-market-share.pdf 'Mindful of the impact web-based start-ups have had on industries like gambling, taxi services and banking, traditional high-street agents are beefing up their own digital businesses, cutting fees and costs and cherry-picking the competition. Fees from residential home sales in the UK are worth about 4 billion pounds a year, according to government data. Online agents' fees of between 500-1,000 pounds have pushed traditional estate agent commissions down to around 1.3 percent of the value of a sale from about 1.8 percent five years ago, according to analysts at UBS. They see fees falling further, to 1 percent. The industry is highly fragmented with the UK market leader Countrywide, which has 822 branches, having only a 5 percent market share. Rightmove, the country's top property portal reckons the many web-based agencies now account for 5 percent of its listings having doubled their share in two years. This may herald a wave of dealmaking. The industry employs around 250,000 people. Rob Ellice, chief executive of easyProperty, backed by easyjet founder Stelios Haji-Ioannou, says it operates on about 20 percent of the staff of a traditional real estate agents. Purplebricks has had to work hard for its success. It spends 1 million pounds a month on advertising and is currently lossmaking. It expects to become profitable this financial year.'