When I started Glentree in 1976, estate agents were a crusty old lot, populated by the quintessential ‘Group Captain Windbag’ with the customary handlebar moustache, fob watch and a plummy accent.

His skills were more suited to propping up the bar with a G&T in a gentleman’s club than they were at making a serious attempt to sell homes for clients.

Then there was the negotiator, ‘Colonel Caruthers’, who preferred a typed letter using Tipp-Ex for corrections (if you remember this) and an Imperial typewriter was a prized asset of the office at the time. Bill Gates and Tim Cook weren’t born yet.

I swept into this antiquated world, brisling with enthusiasm and energy, with absolutely no prior experience. I was a parable of ‘winging it’ and ‘learning on the job’. No surprise there, as I was studying dentistry only a few months earlier.

One man band

Glentree’s colourful two-tone green logo looked more like a garden centre than a serious estate agent aspiring to sell landmark properties in north-west London.

My metallic apple green Alfasud motor car, believe it or not, even in 1976, had a Pye 9 Channel, ‘ship to shore’, car phone in it which, may I remind you, was state-of-the-art technology at the time. Effectively, I was a one-man band office, but as a busker, I still had to know how to play all the instruments, if you get my drift.

Besides ‘For Sale boards’, there were only adverts in the press and magazines which the industry used to promote their properties for sale and rent.

So later on a group of us made a valiant attempt to bring down the page price for the glossy property lifestyle magazines, i.e., Boardroom and Portrait, from an extortionate figure of £2000 per page to £500 per page by the formation of Fabric Magazine.

This was an agent’s collective set up to protect the interests of the industry. Needless to say, soon afterwards, both these magazines went to the wall.

Digital debut

It was only until the mid 90s when the Leeming brothers started what was the first ever property portal – Property Finder – which enabled the digital world to make its debut on the estate agency stage.

Copy cats soon followed including findaproperty.com and Asserta Homes and by the late 90s estate agents’ software had become more widely used in the industry.

Rightmove

Then in 2000, Rightmove was founded by four corporate estate agencies, Countrywide, Connells, Halifax, and Royal Sun Alliance. This emerging portal was free to list and for an agent, so what was there not to like about this model?

In 2001, I was invited to join the Board of Primelocation, which was an £11 million start-up supported by Hamptons, Douglas & Gordon, Savills and Glentree.

This portal managed to ‘hoover up’ a good deal of the central London and high-end agents, while Rightmove attracted a lot of the big agencies and regional independents. Another portal, Property Finder, had a good mix of each of them. The day of the digital portal had arrived. Not before time.

Chickenpox

The Daily Mail Group ‘upped the ante’ by acquiring Primelocation for £48million which was shortly followed by the flotation of Rightmove, which had a market cap of some £400 million at the time, which was a humungous figure by any interpretation.

The ‘genie was out of the bottle’ and portals started to emerge faster than a dose of chickenpox at a children’s party.

At first, the portals offered agents free to list options but very shortly afterwards tariffs were imposed and have since increased exponentially over time, as the portal market has become polarised.

Zoopla was the amalgamation of several smaller portals including Primelocation and very soon they, together with Rightmove, became a predatorial duopoly, bent on the boa constricting of agent’s wallets.

Writing on the wall

In 2012 I could see the writing on the wall for agents, and as such I set up a secret meeting with the ‘great and the good’ of the industry in order to found OnTheMarket.com (OTM).

This was then floated on the stock market about nine years later with a market cap of £110 million. It set its sight on being a ‘giant slayer’ by acting as a haven against the two incumbent portals, Rightmove and Zoopla.

This was a last-ditch attempt to protect agents’ interests, as monthly portal charges continued increase.

Extinguished

Sadly, this laudable aim was extinguished by the sale of the OTM to the USA colossus CoStar for a paltry sum of circa £110 million recently.

Oddly enough, this American connection with the UK residential property portal world has become infectious.

Today, the largest shareholders of all three major property portals are American who appear intent on leveraging their market power at the expense of more than 10,000 small business estate agents.

Conspiracy

Eventually, the day will come when the portals decide to sell properties directly themselves and this will complete the conspiracy to disintermediate agents all together.

One glimmer of hope for agents today is that AI will start to eliminate the need for portals altogether and enquiries will go straight to the agents at no cost.

Rightmove’s largest shareholder are funds managed by USA based Virtus Investment Partners and Zoopla has been owned by a USA equity firm Silver Lake, who have reportedly put a For
Sale sign of circa £600 million for the site.

OnTheMarket.com will inevitably change its name to Homes.com and the Washington DC based CoStar seems intent on dominating the market, not just in the UK but across Europe, where they already have a significant market share.

Cash cow

Rightmove is a ‘cash cow’ and they are forecasting annual revenues of £1.815 billion in the medium term and the rationale for them is to triple monthly agents’ fees, with no end in sight.

They already have an eyewatering profit margin of over 70% (which is obscene for any trading company), and they can thank the naivety of the agents and their brethren for this largesse.

I have tried my hardest to remind my fellow agents that these colossi would be hollow shells had it not been for the data and the monthly subscriptions that the agents somewhat reluctantly provide. The connotation of the ‘drug dealer and addict’ springs to mind.

Frankenstein

No one can say that I have not warned the agents of Armageddon and that they have unwittingly built their own Frankenstein, but ‘none so deaf as those who don’t want to listen’. Lemmings will be lemmings!

Trevor Abrahmsohn is Chief Executive of estate agency Glentree International