The Negotiator’s news website recently published a story about the latest developments at Purplebricks where its senior team are hoping to sell the ailing company. You may be aware that speculation is growing that Strike, which is Purplebricks’ nearest and most successful competitor, is poised to make a formal offer to the PLC’s shareholders. Institutional and private investors with Purplebricks shares are hoping this may be the case. It’s share price has tanked to almost junk status and those who bought when it was worth billions rather than millions, hope to recoup some of their losses.

Following our story, we received several strong and in one case angry comments about the story about our description of Purplebricks as a ‘hybrid agency’. Several of the commentators, who are traditional agents not Purplebricks people, said we should know better to label the agency thus, although they didn’t offer up with any alternatives.

Hybrid: the product of mixing two or more different things.

So I will. But before we go any further, can I point out that the Oxford Dictionary defines hybrid as “something that is the product of mixing two or more different things”.

The problem here is that what started out as ‘online’ estate agents versus traditional high-street estate agents has now shattered into half a dozen kinds of business model, i.e. hybrids.

Purplebricks now directly employs its staff but previously it was ‘hybrid’ because it used regional and/or local franchise-style operators who employed property experts on the ground, controlled via a central HQ and supported with a call centre.

Many agents have embraced this model including Spicerhaart, which in all but name operates a parallel ‘hybrid’ agency model that directly employs staff who, in addition to local branches and their negotiators, operate from home under the Haart but also other brands. And then there’s Hunters, which has rolled out a ‘virtual office’ franchise hybrid model – something Foxtons is rumoured to be rolling out soon outside London.

Some argue that the industry is best defined as those with high street offices, and those without. That’s problematical because there are some agents who have both branch and non-branch based staff – so where do they fall?

One answer to this conundrum is to be agnostic on all this and simply say that if you’re selling or renting homes on behalf of vendors and landlords then you’re an estate agent regardless of where your offices are and whether your staff are employed or not. This also has its complications – many traditional high street agents are frustrated that their off-the- high-street competitors dodge many of their costs including business rates and PAYE.

One answer we’ve come up with at The Negotiator Awards is to consider labelling all agents who are not ‘traditional’ (i.e. don’t have branches and may not directly employ their agents) as ‘new model agents’ within our annual awards.

It may not stop the online comments, but hopefully it’s the best way to accurately describe them, other than using ‘hybrid’.

DO AGENTS NEED BRANCHES?

The answer to that question from Rollo Miles, a founder of estate agency Agent & Homes, is ‘NO’. Recently he revealed that his ‘new business model’ estate agency is to shutter its recently-opened branches saying they ‘simply weren’t needed’. He added, “Agent & Homes is now five years old and when we set it up the idea was to be a platform to empower self-employed agents to work how they want and work where they want and work when they want, and to give them all the tools they need to compete with the high street. After just under a year-and-a-half of having these units it’s crystal clear to me that none of the above happened as a result of having these two shops.

“We didn’t recruit more agents; we didn’t win more instructions and at the end of the day they hindered us more than helped us because we had to man them.”