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Agencies & People

Working nine-to-five IS a way to make a living for estate agents, it is claimed

Estate agents who are 'open all hours' sell homes only 8 days faster than their more traditional 9-to-5 counterparts says GetRentr.

Nigel Lewis

estate agents

Estate agents who open for longer hours sell homes only marginally quicker than their more 9-to-5 competitors, it has been claimed.

Agency comparison website GetRentr says it has examined house sale data from both Zoopla and Rightmove and found only a weak link between longer opening hours and sales success.

The research shows that agents who stick to more traditional opening hours only take eight days more to sell a home on average than their ‘open all hours’ counterparts.

Weekend and late opening first began spreading throughout the industry during the late 1990s when agents such as Foxtons broke the accepted practice of sticking to office hours, and has been accelerated by competition from online and hybrid estate agents.

Many former local property experts who have worked for Purplebricks in the past have complained about the excessively long hours they had to work in order to reach targets.

GetRentr says it looked at 15,000 estate agencies across the UK and compared their ‘time to sell’ performances.

colby short getagent“A lot has been said about longer opening hours, driven by a change in the industry due to online and hybrid competition,” says Colby Short, CEO of GetAgent.

“The perception is that if you’re open for longer you are able to provide better service due to a greater degree of accessibility.

“This simply isn’t the case and longer hours can actually have the opposite impact –  it’s not the hours you are open but the quality of the service you provide within those hours.

“All too often, an agent will be open for longer but this can lead to demotivated staff and a greater workload that can be detrimental in the long run.”

 

June 25, 2019

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