Former estate agent Jacob Deacon has launched a lead generation platform following ten years of working within the property industry.

The 28-year-old quit his job last year to set up Property Price Guru after working at Hertfordshire estate agency Orchid Estates and has been working hard to sign up his first client agents.

“For years I was the person dodging the calls from people like me and now I’m the one being dodged,” he tells The Neg.

“But what I did learn from my agency days was that lead generation platforms tended to be all the same, relying largely on social media ads to bring in the valuations.”

His platform is different because, as well as being cheaper and more effective – he claims – Deacon has “come at it from several different angles that are unorthodox”.

One of those is that Property Price Guru provides local property price-based content to client agents which they can then use to pique the interest of vendors and landlords in specific postcodes.

“From my experience, homeowners just don’t relate as well to general flyers put through their letterbox as they do to specific information about house prices within their postcode presented in a visually attractive way,” he adds.

Agent recommendation

This is combined with their website, which offers vendors and landlords a ’recommended agency’ service that’s different from other ‘recommend an agent’ services.

“We offer a subscription service rather than taking a clip of the agent’s fee and we offer up what we believe are the best three agents in any area based on our research, which we think is a more genuine way to endorse a service and an important point of difference,” says Deacon.

“You can look at data like the number of homes sold, but we wanted to help people understand the quality and style of customer service offered by agents.”

Deacon says it’s early days for the business which he is funding himself, and that the switch to lead generation is something he’s concentrated on over the past six months, having set it up originally in April 2021.