INTERVIEW: What next for the Britain’s largest estate agency?

Connells may be the largest estate agency group in Britain but after the complications of acquiring Countrywide five years ago, the job of ploughing a new furrow for the combined estate agency, conveyancing, auctions and surveying business is no mean feat.

Those gifted that task are Connells Group’s Chief Executive Helen Charlesworth and her operations chief Chris Rosindale (main photo) who when The Neg visited were settling into their new and very smart headquarters in Milton Keynes, the re-organisational result of six buildings being rolled into one. It’s also the physical evidence of the pair’s desire to bring the business, which includes some 86 brands, together in a more meaningful way.

But steering a huge ship like this, which employs some 15,000 people, many of whom are loyal to their local brand rather than ‘head office’, was always going to be a tricky task.

The original seniors behind the acquisition of Countrywide – people like Richard Twigg and David Plumtree who have since the left the business –, spent the first few years after the acquisition racing to make as much money as possible while the sales and lettings markets were on fire which, Charlesworth says, was a sensible ‘crest of the wave’ decision given the money they had spent buying Countrywide.

But now these ‘originals’ have gone and the sales market is sluggish (and lettings now more complicated), what do Charlesworth and Rosindale have up their sleeves?

More autonomy

Both accept that previous efforts to run parts of the business centrally weren’t the ideal approach, and one of the first decisions they made together was to push the decision making “back to where the information is” and encourage both autonomy and accountability.

She says: “We want to empower people to make the right decisions so that they understand their level of performance is down to them and that we don’t have to be there driving them all the time”.

Rosindale adds: “We want people to feel like it’s their own business”.

Get together

The regional management team has been slimmed down from 23 to 18 people in recent months, part of delayed plans to integrate the Countrywide and Connells businesses.

Charlesworth says integration was put on hold while the sales market was busy during the early 2020s, but that the time had come [two years ago when she arrived] to bring the organisation together in a more thoughtful and logical way.

“This was never about taking cost out of the business but taking the best of both organisations and bringing them together,” she says.

“We didn’t have the ability to see the whole business so if you wanted to understand customer satisfaction levels [for example] then until recently managers had to use the separate Countrywide and Connells systems which made everything very hard.”

Rosindale adds: “We used to have managers driving past each other going to the same towns – one whose branches were doing very well while the other said they were struggling despite having the same customer base”.

Both say a more integrated approach is also about staff retention – previously people would leave to join the competition not another Connells Group business; an unnecessary talent loss.

“That stopped us keeping the best people,” he says. “But our new leadership and geography model is already paying dividends.”

Back the high street

One clear message was that Connells Group is solidly committed to remaining on the high street and even if it diversifies and has “other marginal businesses” as Rosindale puts it (he used to work for YOPA, remember) what’s most important to them are the people that work across the whole business.

Charlesworth says: “When people are selling their most precious asset they want to interact with humans face-to-face and that’s really important to us and why we’ve invested so much time and effort in our people.

“If someone gets out of bed in the morning and is fired up about what they’re doing then they’ll light up the customer too.”

Rosindale says: “If you look at the hybrid models like eXp and The Agency UK, they have 5% of the market while 71% of home movers choose an independent estate agency and 10% a corporate so you can say that consumers overwhelmingly want a high street agent to deal with”.

New ideas

Asked whether Connells Group would ever go down the franchising route that competitors TPFG, Winkworth and LSL have embraced, Charlesworth was frank, saying that “the reason why estate agency is so exciting is that it doesn’t stand still – outsiders looking in think it remains the same but it doesn’t.

“We are always having open discussions about what the future looks like but the one thing that keeps me awake at night is coming second and Chris is the same, so we’re always thinking about ‘what next’ and therefore while we don’t have any definitive plans everything is open to consideration”.

Empower local

“We’ve got 86 brands but they’ve all got local provenance – and that means a lot to the people who work for them,” says Charlesworth.

“If you go to Peter Alan in Wales for example and ask them who they work for, they’ll say Peter Alan not Connells Group and I want that to continue.

“Estate agencies like that one are making a difference in their own communities – which is different to big brands who try to cold start in markets that may have never heard of them up until then. We want to endorse and enhance our current brands.

“And remember we’re not just an estate agency – we have many other moving parts including surveying and conveyancing so we’re a sum of all the parts. The way you extract value within this kind of organisation is to pass the power to the brand managers and the people on the front line – protect that strongly and you protect the business.”

Five-year plan

Connells Group is now just into the third year of a five-year plan and after two years of laying the foundations including getting the integration work done and modernising its tech, the remaining years of the plan are going to be all about growth.

“We know the housing market has been struggling recently but that’s allowed us to fix the roof and create the synergies – and we recently had a meeting about which levers we’re going to pull get create growth within the business – and let’s just say watch this space,” says Charlesworth.

Re-start acquisitions

One of those levers is to re-start the acquisition of competitor business to increase market share – Connells Group bought 14 estate agencies last year but this year paused that while it ‘fixed the roof’.

But in 2027 “we’ll be back” says Charlesworth.

Read more about what Charlesworth and Rosindale think about reforming the sales market.