Estate Agency - Is the Digital Devil Finally in the Details?

A few weeks ago whilst I was using this blog to muse on the reasons for the demise of Tesco and the lessons to be learnt, I argued, that, as business cycles quicken inexorably, many of the disruptors of the early days of the internet are already ripe themselves for disruption.

But, I opined, there still are many from the `old` economy who remain supposedly `regulated` - protected by law - and are still getting away with it without serious disruption - high street banks, investment firms, big six utilities, train operating companies, London’s black cabs, the BBC and the big political parties to name but a few. 

And some, I emphasised, like estate agents, appear to live a charmed life when, by all that is rational, their business model should have disappeared years ago.  But that's not to say that the great disruptor, the web, hasn't made any impact on the way homes are sold and let. It has, and not in particularly good way for consumers.  

Another cautionary tale

But the world of property retailing may indeed, like Tesco, be at the beginning of its own cautionary tale. Despite being founded by outsiders to the property industry, rather than disrupting a model the online portals have enabled high-street firms to gain an ever-tighter grip on property sales and lettings. To the extent that now they are employing a quarter of a million people and, it seems, occupying half the real estate on Britain’s dwindling High Streets.

The reality is Rightmove and Zoopla simply created a new interface to an archaic system but are now the first step on the house hunting process. The pair, both FTSE 250 companies, despite the endless local magazines funded by estate agency advertising that thud onto doormats countrywide, are now responsible for generating almost all estate agents' sales leads.  This can be funded only two ways – by the consumer in fees or from estate agents’ margins.  I couldn’t possibly comment on which is more likely.     

And, of course, when such a duopoly exists enabling such a core business activity as client acquisition the suppliers can turn the financial screw on their hapless customers pretty much when and how they like. Having clearly got the message that something had changed their cosy world, some of the bigger, more upmarket estate agency firms, straightened their double cuffs and launched their own property portal.  OnTheMarket (OTM) created by Agents' Mutual, a consortium including the upmarket multiple big boys Knight Frank, Savills and Chestertons, saw the light of day earlier this year.

A new challenger brand

Owned by its members, who, despite Knight Frank et al, are actually predominantly smaller independent agents, the challenger brand is not short of ambition - aiming to replace Zoopla as the second-biggest portal in less than a year.

The cost to agents for OTM, Zoopla and Rightmove are reported to be broadly similar. It's more about control of the duopoly than sheer cost.  But OTM says already it has a third of Zoopla and a quarter of Rightmove’s branch numbers.  Like Tesco, it seems, there is a poorly-treated market ready to move the moment the starting gun is fired.

But unless anyone thinks OTM is some white knight running to the rescue of the consumer, it’s not. It’s clearly a self-serving industry play, exemplified by an interesting strategy behind the growth and one that’s causing the fur to fly behind details-laden windows from Alcester to Zennor - the `two portal rule'.  

OTM member agents are prevented from listing on more than one other portal - in effect forcing them to choose between Rightmove and Zoopla*. As the smaller of the two, Zoopla has always been the most at risk, and the vast majority of branches that have switched allegiance have chosen to drop it.

Of course, what will really determine OTM's fate is if it can gather the momentum to attract enough consumers to the site to convince more agents to move to it, otherwise in a pyrrhic victory it may only serve to make Rightmove stronger and be just a another sickly monkey to its robust, but perhaps short-lived  gorilla.

The distraction of internecine warfare

But to me this all feels like re-arranging deckchairs in the Titanic and such internecine warfare that ignores the interests of customers could turn out to be a distraction from the real threat that is set to challenge high street estate agents in the coming years – a long-overdue disruption by pure play online firms.

Nailing up a sign and placing ads has long been an option for those property owners not wanting to subsidise café-like interiors, wall-to-wall hair gel and cutesy cars.  But most don’t bother, even when enabled by early internet entrepreneurs. But a new breed of online valued-added estate agents is starting to appear, claiming to offer almost all the benefits - imagined and otherwise - of a traditional estate agent, but at a fraction of the cost.

Companies such as HouseSimple, emoov and Purplebricks have attracted serious investment from apparently savvy investors and are growing apace. And in the current frothy market rumours of IPO even surround them.

More than portal on-ramps

While earlier online agents were little more than on-ramps for private sellers to get their home onto Rightmove and Zoopla leaving the seller to do the rest, this new breed of agents offers valuation, professional photography, help in arranging viewings and with negotiations, all with easy financial terms.

This 'full service' approach can start at less than £500, compared with a typical estate agent fee of around 1.5% of the selling price plus VAT. That would save you about somewhere short of £6,000 on a house at the national average and many more times that if you live almost anywhere in London. And that’s a lot of money by anyone’s standards

Of course we may be facing just another inertia-laden false dawn and the time taken to get to the tipping point is anyone’s guess but the current estate agency model is simply too expensive and offers too little value to be sustainable.

But one wonders what will happen to the High Street when they are gone?  Will we all be jumping into our one-owner bargain basement used Minis and Fiat 500s to get an artisanal coffee and some charity bargains from a former Tesco Local?

* Since this blog was first published Zoopla has revealed a strategy to counter its decline in the property sales portal market - diversification - with plans to acquire utilities price comparison site uSwitch for up to £190m