Bob Scarff: ‘How I’d fix Countrywide, and why it’s in trouble’

Former Countrywide estate agency MD Bob Scarff has gone on record to reveal what he would do to save the business and why it’s gone so awry.

Scarff, who during his 35-plus year and 16 years as estate agency MD at Countrywide was in charge of 800 branches and 6,000 staff, says his first move would be to reconnect the company’s financial services and estate agency operations which were separated during the Platt years.

“When I was there we were achieving a mortgage penetration rate into house sales well in excess of 60% which many people don’t believe but it’s true,” he says in the video (see below).

“The reason we could achieve that is that we were arranging mortgages for other agent’s house sales because we were seeing buyers much earlier in the process because of the integration between our estate agency and financial services arms.”

Scarff now heads up telephony tech firm Callwell and says if he were back in his old job he’d be worrying whether Countrywide has fallen too far behind to be saved.

Falling standards

“If a very successful branch starts to falter then you’ve got time to do something about it before it’s too late because you know you’re losing market share and your customer service standards are falling,” he says.

“But I don’t know whether, because it was run by people who had no instinct for these kinds of things, it’s now all gone too far, and that’s what is behind some of the closures.

“Because you get to a point where a branch is so poor that you either throw a load more money at it and start from scratch or close it.”

Scarff also pours cold water on the idea that hybrid/online agents can successfully sell ‘add on’ services and claims that Countrywide’s business was and still is ‘almost completely dependent’ on face to face interaction.

“It would have been an enormous change in human nature to have swept that away, and it hasn’t done.”

To find out what Scarff thinks of the current senior and middle management, his previous boss Grenville Turner, how Countrywide could have fought off Purplebricks and what else he’d do to nurse the company back to rude health, watch the interview in full.

Watch the video